Former President Barack Obama praised Australia’s gun confiscation following a mass shooting during an interview that aired Tuesday morning.
“We are unique among advanced, developed nations in tolerating, on a routine basis, gun violence in the form of shootings, mass shootings, suicides,” Obama told “CBS This Morning” co-host Nate Burleson. “In Australia, you had one mass shooting 50 years ago and they said, ‘No, we’re not doing that anymore.’ That is normally how you would expect a society to respond when your children are at risk.” (RELATED: Texas GOP Rep. Says Americans Should Carry Guns To Stop Active Shooters, Following Mall Shooting)
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Australia carried out a mandatory “buy back” of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns after a 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur. Obama previously praised Australia for its gun control laws while President, including in 2014.
“I think somehow — and there are a lot of historical reasons for this — gun ownership in this country became an ideological issue and a partisan issue in ways that it shouldn’t be,” Obama told Burleson. “It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars. Instead of thinking about it in a very pragmatic way, we end up really arguing about identity and emotion and all kinds of stuff that does not have to do with keeping our children safe.”
President Joe Biden, Congressional Democrats, media figures and celebrities demanded a ban on so-called “assault weapons” in the wake of mass shootings in a Nashville school, a bank in Louisville and an outlet mall in Allen, Texas.
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