We Can’t Accept This
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/09/23/president-obama-memorial-service-victims-navy-yard-shooting-we-can-t-accept?utm_source=snapshot&utm_medium=email&utm_content=092313-topper
On Sunday, President Obama spoke at a memorial service to
honor the victims of the Navy Yard shooting, and to thank first responders for
their work.
“We know that no words we offer today are equal to the
magnitude, to the depths of that loss,” the President told the families of the
victims. “But we come together as a grateful nation to honor your loved ones,
to grieve with you, and to offer, as best we can, some solace and comfort.”
President Obama explained that this is the fifth time since
taking office that he’s grieved with communities ripped apart by gun violence:
Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims
of the Navy Yard Shooting
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/22/remarks-president-memorial-service-victims-navy-yard-shooting
The Marine Barracks
Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT: Secretary Hagel, Secretary Mabus, Admirals
Greenert and Hilarides, Mayor Gray, leaders from across this city and our Armed
Forces, to all the outstanding first responders, and, most of all, the families
whose hearts have been broken -- we cannot begin to comprehend your loss. We
know that no words we offer today are equal to the magnitude, to the depths of
that loss. But we come together as a grateful nation to honor your loved ones,
to grieve with you, and to offer, as best we can, some solace and comfort.
On the night that we lost Martin Luther King Jr. to a
gunman’s bullet, Robert Kennedy stood before a stunned and angry crowd in Indianapolis and he broke
the terrible news. And in the anguish of that moment, he turned to the words of
an ancient Greek poet, Aeschylus: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Pain which cannot forget -- drop
by drop upon the heart.
The tragedy and the
pain that brings us here today is extraordinary. It is unique. The lives that
were taken from us were unique. The memories their loved ones carry are unique,
and they will carry them and endure long after the news cameras are gone. But
part of what wears on as well is the sense that this has happened before. Part
of what wears on us, what troubles us so deeply as we gather here today, is how
this senseless violence that took place in the Navy Yard echoes other recent
tragedies.
As President, I have now grieved with five American
communities ripped apart by mass violence. Fort Hood.
Tucson. Aurora. Sandy
Hook. And now, the Washington
Navy Yard. And these mass shootings occur against a backdrop of daily
tragedies, as an epidemic of gun violence tears apart communities across America -- from the streets of Chicago to neighborhoods not far from here.
And so, once again, we remember our fellow Americans who
were just going about their day doing their jobs, doing what they loved -- in
this case, the unheralded work that keeps our country strong and our Navy the
finest fleet in the world. These patriots doing their work that they were so
proud of, and who have now been taken away from us by unspeakable violence.
Once more we come together to mourn the lives of beauty and
to comfort the wonderful families who cherished them. Once more we pay tribute
to all who rushed towards the danger, who risked their lives so others might
live, and who are in our prayers today, including Officer Scott Williams. Once
more our hearts are broken. Once more we ask why. Once more we seek strength
and wisdom through God's grace.
You and your
families, this Navy family, are still in the early hour of your grief. And I'm
here today to say that there is nothing routine about this tragedy. There is
nothing routine about your loss. Your loved ones will not be forgotten. They
will endure in the hearts of the American people and in the hearts of the Navy
that they helped to keep strong, and the hearts of their coworkers and their
friends and their neighbors.
“I want them to know
how she lived,” Jessica Gaarde said of her mother Kathy. “She is not a number,
or some statistic.” None of these 12 fellow Americans are statistics. Today, I
want every American to see how these men and women lived. You may have never
met them, but you know them. They're your neighbors -- like Arthur Daniels, out
there on the weekend, polishing his white Crown Victoria; and Kenneth Proctor, with his
beloved yellow Mustang, who, if you asked, would fix your car, too.
She was the friendly face at the store. Sylvia Frasier, with
her unforgettable gold hair, who took a second job at Walmart because, she
said, she just loved working with people. She was the diehard fan you sat next
to at the game. Kathy Gaarde loved her hockey and her Caps, a season ticket
holder for 25 years.
They were the volunteers who made your community better.
Frank Kohler, giving dictionaries to every third-grader in his county; Marty
Bodrog, leading the children’s Bible study at church. They lived the American
Dream -- like Kisan Pandit, who left everything he knew in India for this
land of opportunity, and raised a wonderful family and dedicated himself to the
United States Navy. They were proud veterans -- like Gerald Read, who wore the
Army uniform for more than 25 years; and Michael Arnold, who became one of the
Navy’s leading architects, of whom a colleague said, “nobody knew those ships
like him.”
They were dedicated fathers -- like Mike Ridgell, coaching
his daughter’s softball teams, joining Facebook just to keep up with his girls,
one of whom said, “he was always the cool dad.” They were loving mothers --
like Mary Francis Knight, devoted to her daughters, and who had just recently
watched with joy as her older daughter got married. They were doting
grandparents -- like John Johnson, always smiling, giving bear hugs to his 10
grandchildren, and who would have welcomed his 11th grandchild this fall.
These are not
statistics. They are the lives that have been taken from us. This is how far a
single act of violence can ripple. A husband has lost his wife. Wives have lost
their husbands. Sons and daughters have lost their moms and their dads. Little
children have lost their grandparents. Hundreds in our communities have lost a
neighbor, and thousands here have lost a friend.
As has been mentioned, for one family, the Daniels family,
old wounds are ripped open again. Priscilla has lost Arthur, her husband of 30
years. Only a few years ago, as Mayor Gray indicated, another shooting took the
life of their son, just 14 years old. “I can’t believe this is happening
again,” Priscilla says.
So these families have endured a shattering tragedy. It
ought to be a shock to us all as a nation and as a people. It ought to obsess
us. It ought to lead to some sort of transformation. That’s what happened in
other countries when they experienced similar tragedies. In the United Kingdom, in Australia, when just a single mass
shooting occurred in those countries, they understood that there was nothing
ordinary about this kind of carnage. They endured great heartbreak, but they
also mobilized and they changed, and mass shootings became a great rarity.
And yet, here in the United States,
after the round-of-clock coverage on cable news, after the heartbreaking
interviews with families, after all the speeches and all the punditry and all
the commentary, nothing happens. Alongside the anguish of these American
families, alongside the accumulated outrage so many of us feel, sometimes I
fear there’s a creeping resignation that these tragedies are just somehow the
way it is, that this is somehow the new normal.
We can’t accept this. As Americans bound in grief and love,
we must insist here today there is nothing normal about innocent men and women
being gunned down where they work. There is nothing normal about our children
being gunned down in their classrooms. There is nothing normal about children
dying in our streets from stray bullets.
No other advanced
nation endures this kind of violence -- none. Here in America, the
murder rate is three times what it is in other developed nations. The murder
rate with guns is ten times what it is in other developed nations. And there is
nothing inevitable about it. It comes about because of decisions we make or
fail to make. And it falls upon us to make it different.
Sometimes it takes an unexpected voice to break through, to
help remind us what we know to be true. And we heard one of those voices last
week. Dr. Janis Orlowski’s team at Medstar
Washington Hospital
Center treated the
wounded. And in the midst of one of her briefings, she spoke with heartbreaking
honesty as somebody who sees, daily and nightly, the awful carnage of so much
violence. We are a great country, she said, but “there’s something wrong.” All
these shootings, all these victims, she said, “this is not America.” “It
is a challenge to all of us,” she said, and “we have to work together to get
rid of this.”
And that’s the wisdom we should be taking away from this
tragedy and so many others -- not accepting these shootings as inevitable, but
asking what can we do to prevent them from happening again and again and again.
I've said before, we cannot stop every act of senseless violence. We cannot
know every evil that lurks in troubled minds. But if we can prevent even one
tragedy like this, save even one life, spare other families what these families
are going through, surely we've got an obligation to try.
It's true that each of the tragedies I've mentioned is
different. And in this case, it's clear we need to do a better job of securing
our military facilities and deciding who gets access to them. And as Commander
in Chief, I have ordered a review of procedures up and down the chain, and I
know that Secretary Hagel is moving aggressively on that. As a society, it’s
clear we've got to do a better job of ensuring that those who need mental
health care actually get it, and that in those efforts we don't stigmatize
those who need help. Those things are clear, and we've got to move to address
them.
But we Americans are not an inherently more violent people
than folks in other countries. We're not inherently more prone to mental health
problems. The main difference that sets our nation apart, what makes us so
susceptible to so many mass shootings, is that we don’t do enough -- we don’t
take the basic, common-sense actions to keep guns out of the hands of criminals
and dangerous people. What's different in America is it's easy to get your
hands on gun -- and a lot of us know this. But the politics are difficult, as
we saw again this spring. And that’s sometimes where the resignation comes from
-- the sense that our politics are frozen and that nothing will change.
Well, I cannot accept
that. I do not accept that we cannot find a common-sense way to preserve our
traditions, including our basic Second Amendment freedoms and the rights of
law-abiding gun owners, while at the same time reducing the gun violence that
unleashes so much mayhem on a regular basis. And it may not happen tomorrow and
it may not happen next week, it may not happen next month -- but it will
happen. Because it's the change that we need, and it's a change overwhelmingly
supported by the majority of Americans.
By now, though, it should be clear that the change we need
will not come from Washington, even when
tragedy strikes Washington.
Change will come the only way it ever has come, and that’s from the American
people. So the question now is not whether, as Americans, we care in moments of
tragedy. Clearly, we care. Our hearts are broken -- again. And we care so
deeply about these families. But the question is, do we care enough?
Do we care enough to
keep standing up for the country that we know is possible, even if it’s hard,
and even if it’s politically uncomfortable? Do we care enough to sustain the
passion and the pressure to make our communities safer and our country safer?
Do we care enough to do everything we can to spare other families the pain that
is felt here today?
Our tears are not
enough. Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor
these 12 men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can go to
work, and go to school, and walk our streets free from senseless violence,
without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun, then we're going to
have to change. We're going to have to change.
On Monday morning, these 12 men and women woke up like they
did every day. They left home and they headed off to work. Gerald Read’s wife
Cathy said, “See you tonight for dinner.” And John Johnson looked at his wife
Judy and said what he always said whenever they parted, “Goodbye beautiful. I
love you so much."
“Even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own
despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What Robert Kennedy
understood, what Dr. King understood, what all our great leaders have always
understood, is that wisdom does not come from tragedy alone or from some sense
of resignation in the fallibility of man. Wisdom comes through the recognition
that tragedies such as this are not inevitable, and that we possess the ability
to act and to change, and to spare others the pain that drops upon our hearts.
So in our grief, let us seek that grace. Let us find that wisdom. And in doing
so, let us truly honor these 12 American patriots.
May God hold close
the souls taken from us and grant them eternal peace. May He comfort and watch
over these families. And may God grant us the strength and the wisdom to keep
safe our United States of
America.