Former US secretary of defense Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday issued an emotional plea following the South Carolina church shooting, calling for “common-sense” gun-control reforms and a national reckoning with the persistent problem of “institutional racism.”
Three days after nine black church members were gunned down in Charleston, the Democratic US presidential contender said the nation must take steps to keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill.
Regulations can be passed while still respecting the US Constitution’s Second Amendment and “respecting responsible gun owners,” she said.
The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.
“The politics on this issue have been poisoned, but we cannot give up,” Clinton told the US Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco on Saturday. “The stakes are too high. The costs are too dear.”
In 2013 the US Congress rejected legislation that would have expanded background checks on firearms sales and banned some semi-automatic weapons.
US President Barack Obama has blamed the continued national political inaction on the issue on the influence of the National Rifle Association, the leading gun rights lobbying group.
While Clinton did not propose any specific legislation in her address, she has previously supported limits on gun sales and extending the assault weapons ban.
On Friday, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who is challenging Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, called for an assault weapons ban, stricter background checks and tougher requirements to buy a gun.
“I’m pissed,” he wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “It’s time we called this what it is: a national crisis.”
Clinton’s remarks also marked a forceful entry into the heated topic of race relations, an issue that has become a major theme of her campaign. Clinton called race a “deep fault line” in the US, adding that “millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.”
The problem of racism is not limited to “kooks and Klansmen,” she said, adding that it includes the off-hand, off-color joke; whites scared of young black men and not speaking up against poverty and discrimination.
In previous appearances, Clinton has taken up a number of issues that are important to African-Americans, calling for changes to the criminal justice system, voting laws and assistance for minority small business owners. Her campaign is trying to motivate the coalition of minority, young and liberal voters that twice elected Obama to the White House.
“We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America,” she said. “We have to name them, and then own them and then change them.”
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