Tag: El Paso massacre

Trump said doctors left operating rooms to greet him after mass shootings. Hospitals in Dayton and El Paso say that’s not true.

Washington Post logoSpeaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn on Wednesday, President Trump claimed he was warmly welcomed at hospitals in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and intimated that surgeons had even deserted their patients to meet him.

“The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms,” Trump said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it.”

But the hospitals he visited say that isn’t what happened — and that doctors would never pause surgery to greet the president.

View the complete August 23 article by Antonia Noori Farzan on The Washington Post website here.

Last weekends mass shootings, and GOP’s unwillingness to address them, leaves Minnesotans exasperated and angry

Last weekend, the U.S. suffered two separate horrific mass shootings, one in El Paso and one in Dayton. Despite calls from millions of Americans, Donald Trump and the GOP refuse to take any actions to address the lax gun laws that enable these mass shooters from acquiring these weapons that, in the case of the Dayton, Ohio shooter, gave the killer the ability to kill nine people and injure 27 in less than 30 seconds. 

The shootings in El Paso and Dayton are horrifying, vile, and absolutely heartbreaking. It’s time to stop mincing words: these shootings happen because Republicans refuse to enact common-sense gun safety reforms. These shootings will continue to happen unless Republicans change their minds or are voted out of office. Since the former is highly unlikely, the Minnesota DFL and the Democratic Party will be working damn hard to unseat every Republican standing in the way of the gun safety laws we desperately need.

VIA DFL Chairman Ken Martin’s Facebook page:

“I wish I was shocked by what happened in El Paso and Dayton yesterday. These actions happen so frequently now in America that we have become desensitized to these horrific murders. We quickly condemn, we send our thoughts and prayers and then NOTHING happens. We go back to our lives and then the cycle repeats.

Continue reading “Last weekends mass shootings, and GOP’s unwillingness to address them, leaves Minnesotans exasperated and angry”

Video emerges of Trump ranting about ‘crazy’ Beto O’Rourke’s crowd size during El Paso hospital visit

AlterNet logoFollowing mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend, President Donald Trump visited both of those cities on Wednesday — and a video posted on Twitter shows that even when he was visiting a hospital, Trump couldn’t resist insulting Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.

In the video (which was filmed at University Medical Center of El Paso), Trump can be seen exchanging pleasantries with hospital staff with First Lady Melania Trump at his side. And when he discusses visiting El Paso in February to speak at a rally, Trump brags about attracting a larger crowd than O’Rourke (who also had a February event in that city).

“That was some crowd,” Trump says of his February rally in El Paso. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, and they said his crowd was wonderful.”

View the complete August 8 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump: All El Paso shooting patients being treated at hospital ‘refused to meet with president’

Every El Paso mass shooting patient being treated at a local hospital refused to meet with Donald Trump when he visited, a spokesperson for the facility has said.

The US president on Wednesday travelled to both the Texas city and Dayton, Ohio, to meet with victims and first responders following two mass shootings over the weekend which left 31 people dead and dozens injured.

But following Mr Trump’s departure from University Medical Center (UMC), where he met two victims already discharged by the hospital, UMC spokesperson Ryan Mielke revealed the eight patients still being treated there did not agree to meet the US leader.

View the complete August 8 article by Tom Embury-Dennis of The Independent on the Yahoo News website here.

Trump attacks local leaders as he visits two cities grieving from mass shootings

Washington Post logoEL PASO — On a day when President Trump vowed to tone down his rhetoric and help the country heal following two mass slayings, he did the opposite — lacing his visits Wednesday to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, with a flurry of attacks on local leaders and memorializing his trips with grinning thumbs-up photos.

A traditional role for presidents has been to offer comfort and solace to all Americans at times of national tragedy, but the day provided a fresh testament to Trump’s limitations in striking notes of unity and empathy.

When Trump swooped into the grieving border city of El Paso to offer condolences following the massacre of Latinos allegedly by a white supremacist, some of the city’s elected leaders and thousands of its citizens declared the president unwelcome.

View the complete August 8 article by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Jenna Johnson and Felicia Sonmez on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s trip to Dayton and El Paso marked by protests, attacks on critics

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Wednesday traveled to El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, where meetings with first responders and survivors of mass shootings were marked by calls for tougher gun laws and the president’s attacks on Democrats and the media.

Trump stayed out of public view for most of the trip, which came just days after massacres in El Paso and Dayton left more than 30 dead and dozens injured. He held closed-door meetings at hospitals in both cities before making brief remarks at an emergency operations center in El Paso.

Most photos from the day’s trip came from official White House accounts, which showed Trump and the first lady smiling for pictures with hospital staff and meeting with patients recovering from injuries.

View the complete August 7 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

‘A new low’: Washington Post media critic blows up Tucker Carlson’s absurd lies about white nationalism

AlterNet logoOn Saturday, August 3, El Paso became the scene of a terrorist attack that left 22 people dead — and the suspect, according to police, had written a manifesto indicating that he planned to target Latinos specifically because they were “invading” Texas. The attack has focused attention on the terrorist threat posed by white supremacists and white nationalists, but on Tuesday, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson insisted that white supremacy is a “hoax” — and with that comment, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan asserts, Carlson has “hit a new low.”

To hear Carlson tell it, white supremacy isn’t a real problem in the United States. Carlson, on Tuesday, declared, “This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

In response, Sullivan writes in her August 7 column that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was no laughing matter — explaining that “the Russian attacks on America’s voting integrity, in order to help Donald Trump become president, are anything but a hoax, as the Mueller Report made abundantly clear.”

View the complete August 7 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

The El Paso and Dayton shootings weren’t an aberration. They were a statistical certainty.

The United States has been averaging more than one mass shooting per day for almost four years now.

On Saturday, millions of Americans went to bed mourning the latest deadly mass shooting — this one in El Paso, Texas — and woke up the next day to news of a second, in Dayton, Ohio. The weekend carnage left at least 29 people dead, and plenty of indignation about Republican lawmakers who refuse to take up any meaningful gun reform, continuing to take money from pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association.

In truth, however, there was nothing particularly remarkable about the close timing of these two attacks: the United States has been averaging more than one mass shooting per day for at least the past three and a half years.

According to the definition established by the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks every mass shooting in the country, a mass shooting is any incident in which at least four people were shot. And so far in 2019, there have been 255 such incidents. Monday, August 5 is just the 217th day of the year.

View the complete August 5 article by Adam Peck on the ThinkProgress website here.

Trump on El Paso shooting: We must condemn white supremacy

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Monday called on the nation to condemn white supremacy following last weekend’s back-to-back mass shootings and threw his support behind new measures focused on mental illness, rather than stricter gun laws.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn bigotry, hatred and white supremacy,” Trump said in a nationally televised address from the Diplomatic Room of the White House. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated.”

Trump was delivering his first in-depth remarks on the pair of shootings that left 30 dead and dozens more wounded in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. He denounced the shootings as “barbaric slaughters” and condemned the El Paso shooter as “consumed with racist hate.”

View the complete August 5 article by Jordan Fabian and Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Conservative writer says it all: ‘There is no excuse for supporting this president’

AlterNet logoWriting for the Washington Post  (and reprinted here in the Salt Lake Tribune)conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin expresses what every American possessed of any decency or moral clarity should realize, now that the the murderous effects of Donald Trump’s deliberate, hate-filled, anti-immigrant rhetoric have once again inspired a mass killing of innocent Americans, this time in El Paso, Texas. As Rubin observes, there is really no longer any doubt where the blame for these killings lies.

For decades now, Republicans have insisted mass murders with semiautomatic weapons are not reflective of a gun problem. I can no longer comprehend how such a ludicrous assertion is remotely acceptable. But in one sense they are right: It’s not merely Republicans’ indulgence of the National Rifle Association that puts Americans’ lives in jeopardy. It is the support and enabling of a president that inspires white nationalist terrorists – and even denies white nationalism is a problem.

Republicans in the United States Congress who claim to have any self-respect or moral conscience (assuming there are any remaining) really ought to pay attention to what she is saying—that their party, by its slavish acquiescence to Trump’s racism for purposes of political opportunism, shares with him the responsibility for these deaths.

View the complete August 5 article from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.