GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said on Friday morning that no President, including himself, would be able to prevent tragedies like Thursday’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, which left 10 dead.
“People are going to slip through the cracks,” Trump said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?”
Trump suggested that stronger gun control legislation, which President Obama advocated for in a heartfelt speech on Thursday night, would be ineffective at catching every potential school shooter before he or she acted.
“You’re going to have these things happen and it’s a horrible thing to behold, horrible,” Trump said. “It’s not politically correct to say, but you’re going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there’s going to be difficulty, and people are going to slip through the cracks.”
Trump’s responses managed to avoid MSNBC host Willie Geist’s question of what he would do as President to prevent similar attacks. Though he acknowledged that school shootings are “sort of unique to this country,” he said we already “have very strong laws on the books” and seemed resigned to the prospect of future incidents.
“What are you going to do?” Trump said. “That’s the way the world works, and that’s the way the world always has worked.”
A 2014 FBI report found that even though homicides are down overall, mass shootings have risen drastically in the last seven years, and research conducted by Harvard University scholars indicated that since 2011, a mass shooting occurs every 64 days in the U.S., on average.
Watch Trump’s comments below:
