Former President Barack Obama says gun ownership in America has turned into an ideological issue and a “proxy for arguments about our culture wars,” instead of a safety issue.
Obama, in an excerpt from an interview with “CBS Mornings” set to air on Tuesday, argued that “Gun ownership in this country became a ideological issue and a partisan issue in ways that it shouldn’t be.”
“It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars. You know, urban versus rural. Race is always an element in these issues,” he said.
“Instead of just taking a very practical approach, like we do let’s say for example with car safety, where we say, ‘alright, we got a bunch of accidents? Let’s have seatbelts. Let’s make cars safer. Let’s engineer our roads so that we prevent them’” he said. “Instead of thinking about it in a very pragmatic way, we end up really arguing about identity and emotion and all kinds of stuff that does not have to do with keeping our children safe.”
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The interview comes after a shooting at a Texas outlet mall left eight people dead and seven injured earlier this month. It was the sixth public mass killing of 2023.
This year, there have been 22 mass killings, defined as four or more people killed, not including the perpetrator, according to the USA TODAY/Northeastern University/Associated Press Mass Killings Database.
President Joe Biden is set to convene governors and state lawmakers at the White House to call on them to strengthen gun background checks on buyers younger than 21 years old.
Among other moves, the president said in a Sunday op-ed in USA TODAY that he is also calling for states to enact laws to provide the federal background check system “access to all records that could prohibit someone under age 21 from purchasing a firearm.”
Biden has repeatedly called on Congress to reinstate a federal ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, a push that hasn’t swayed Republican lawmakers.
Contributing: Grace Hauck, Joey Garrison, USA TODAY
