FLAP POINT, TENNESSEE “How dare President Obama mention firearms just hours after at least one firearm was used by an unstable, apparently quite racist domestic terrorist to gun down nine people in a racially-motivated hate crime,” demanded conservative talk radio host Garret Garrison. Garret has been a host of the “Garrison Files in the AM” radio show in Flap Point, Tennessee since 1989, and he says he has “had it up to [his] swim shorts” with liberals using horrible tragedies to speak about the facts of said tragedies. “Because it always starts with facts, and then next think you know, they’re trying to convince you of something with those facts.”
What had Garrison so fuming mad the morning our reporter interviewed him was the fact that in his press conference in which he spoke about the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina that cost nine people their lives, President Barack Obama in Garret’s estimation “went all Maobama on us again, and tried to tells us he’s comin’ for our guns!” It was on the evening of Wednesday, June 18th, 2015 that 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof shot and killed nine members of the congregation at one of the country’s most historical and oldest African-American churches, and when President Obama spoke to the nation the following morning, that’s when Garrison says he “overstepped our beloved, ordained by God and written Christ’s blood Constitution” by “even saying the word ‘gun’.”
“Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” said Obama in his mid-morning press conference. He would go on to bemoan the fact that the kind of mass killing perpetrated by Roof seems to be far more prevalent in the United States when he said that the people of the U.S. “have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
To Bobby Robertson, a Republican pollster in Iowa, Obama’s words were “tantamount to treason” because they “clearly ignore the beauty, importance, and power” of the Second Amendment. “Why does this man always have to talk about guns after someone uses a gun to kill someone, or two someones, or a crowded room full of someones, or a crowded first grade classroom full of little someones,” Robertson asked our reporter. “Why can’t he focus on all the other issues that contributed to it first? Oh sure, he also talks about mental health support systems and shit, but it always inevitably gets back to him going all, ‘Hey, guns are like being used to kill a lot of people and maybe we should think about how we allow people access to them.'” Robertson says that “it’s every American’s right to own a gun free and clear of any serious thought” and that “Obama should focus on not taxing us more” instead of “talking about factual things like a lot of guns being used to commit a lot of crimes.”
“This is the 14th goddamned one of these things I’ve had to do,” Obama would say later at a dinner being held at the White House for students in the D.C. area with a 4.0 grade average. He felt like he could “let [his] hair down” as his administration wound down, and he chose this such occasion to just that. “I mean, here’s the thing, do they want me to pretend as if someone shot nine peoplei in a church with a banana? Or you know, with a popsicle? The guy used a gun. And they always use guns. Because why wouldn’t they? It’s a natural born right to own a gun in this country after all,” Obama said.
“And you know, the really funny part is that I’m not even out there saying I want to take everyone’s guns. I’m just looking at 14 times now I’ve had to address a situation where someone who clearly shouldn’t have had a gun, had a gun, and I am commenting on that. The more important part of this story though is that this kid who shot those people? He doesn’t become racist overnight. He doesn’t just wake up one day with the level of depraved indifference to black people it took for him to murder those people.
Quite frankly, I think even the political left in this country would be making a mistake to turn this story into one solely about gun control. I mean, clearly it is far too easy for dangerous people to get a gun in this country, particularly when we simply do not dedicate nearly enough resources to finding and helping those with mental illness. But the bottom line is that while we may look at white supremacy as a mental illness — psychiatrists and psychologists don’t actually consider it to be as such. That doesn’t mean we won’t learn that the kid did in fact have some other mental illness, but the fact remains that the key element of this story was just good old fashioned American racism,” Obama told reporters.
Obama was winding down for the night, but as he headed to the living quarters in the White House he turned to reporters. “This country has accomplished some wonderful things. We have mended so many fences between white, black, brown, green, purple and every in between. We really have come a long way,” Obama paused, reflecting. “But we’re also particularly adept at straight-up ignoring racial problems. Dylann Roof didn’t just spring up out of nowhere with semi-automatic weapons and a penchant for killing black people. He was taught to think and feel this way, and that is what generational and systemic racism looks like.”
“People like Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia, they want us to continue that tradition of ignoring racial divides. They want us to chalk up events like these as isolated, random incidents, because if they put this event in its proper context, right alongside the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the church bombings in the south during the Civil Rights fight, you will start to feel like we have to do more. And these people don’t us to do anything, much less more.” Obama turned and walked away.
