Obama on gun control: AK-47s are for soldiers, not crooks
US President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks on the shootings in Aurora, Colorado at what was scheduled originally as a campaign event at Harborside Event Center July 20, 2012 in Fort Myers, Florida. “Such violence, such evil, is senseless. But while we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the live of another, we do know what makes life worth living,” he told a somber crowd in Florida.
President Obama spoke on the hot button issue of gun control in New Orleans Wednesday, commenting on the mass shooting last week in a Colorado movie theater to call for a "consensus around violence reduction" in the country, Politico reported.
Though earlier this week, White House press secretary Jay Carney had implied that Obama was unlikely to wade into new gun legislation, Obama told the National Urban League in the Big Easy that he believed that a lot of gun owners would agree that "AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, and not in the hands of crooks," the Washington Post reported.
Mitt Romney, Obama's opponent in the upcoming presidential election, weighed in on gun control earlier on Wednesday.
“I don’t happen to believe that America needs new gun laws. A lot of what this young man did was clearly against the law, but the fact that it was against the law did not prevent it from happening,” Romney told “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, implying that gunman in the Colorado shootings had obtained his guns illegally.
Earlier this week, Romney said that different gun laws wouldn't have made a difference in the Colorado massacre.
"I still believe that the Second Amendment is the right course to preserve and defend, and I don't believe that new laws are going to make a difference in this type of tragedy," he said to CNBC on Monday.