Five years after a horrific shooting at Virginia Tech killed 32 people and wounded 15 others, today Connecticut was rocked by what could be one of the worst school shootings in history, and the second mass shooting this week alone.
Colin Goddard, a survivor of Virginia Tech who still has three bullets lodged into his body, joined Andrea Mitchell to discuss the progress–or lack thereof–that the country has made since that tragic day in April 2007. Goddard, now assistant director of federal legislation at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told Andrea Mitchell that he was still trying to wrap his head around what happened in Oregon earlier this week.
“This is not something that should be normal in this country,” Goddard told Andrea Mitchell. “This is not something that other countries experience like we do.”
During Goddard’s appearance on Andrea Mitchell Reports, we heard the White House reaction to the shooting. White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters asking about gun violence that there will be “a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.”
Hearing this reaction, Goddard said, “If you follow the logic of ‘you can’t talk about this,’ then there is never a day to talk about this. We should have had this conversation yesterday,” he said. “We should have had this before the shooting in Oregon, before the shooting in Wisconsin, before the shooting in Colorado, before the shooting in Virginia, and I could go on.” Since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, Goddard told Andrea Mitchell, there has been very little progress. “We see these mass shootings and we express our condolences, we express our sympathies, and then that’s where it ends,” Goddard said. “There is no action after that, and that’s the missing piece to this problem. That’s what we have to do now,” he insisted, “come together and call on our decision makers to change things, to live in a better nation that we all want and deserve.”
Yardena Schwartz Recommended
