During a White House press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump's press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, refused to discuss the possibility of implementing gun control in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in modern history.
"Today is a day for consoling the survivors and mourning those we lost. Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with all of those individuals. There’s a time and place for a political debate, but now is the time to unite as a country," Sanders said when asked about the proper role of the gun control debate in the aftermath of the shooting.
She later added that gun control laws "won’t stop these types of things from happening," citing Chicago crime rates as evidence that strict gun control laws aren't necessarily effective.
By contrast, Trump waited for less than one week after the San Bernardino shootings in December 2015 before advocating a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."
He waited less than a day to crow that he was right about terrorism after the then-worst mass shooting in modern American history.
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
Sanders' response came after an opening statement in which she choked up, saying: "the memory of those who displayed ultimate expressions of love in the midst of an unimaginable act of hate will never fade. Their examples will serve as an eternal reminder that the American spirit cannot and will not ever be broken."
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