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Asked About Preventing Next Sandy Hook Shooting, White House Pivots to Immigration

By Andrew Ujifusa — December 14, 2017 1 min read
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded Thursday to a question about efforts to prevent school shootings by citing President Donald Trump’s attempts to tighten border security and bolster vetting processes for those entering the U.S.

Thursday marked five years since a gunman, Adam Lanza, killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The shootings stunned the nation and led to calls by then-President Barack Obama and others for more gun control. Those efforts went nowhere in Congress, although some states did change their gun laws after the Sandy Hook killings.

When Margaret Brennan of CBS News asked Sanders about the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent incidents like what happened in Newtown, as well as the mass shooting in Las Vegas earlier this year, Sanders said, “There are a number of diferent ways that we look to protect our citizens every single day. One of the areas the president has been outspoken about, not necessarily to those two instances, but just more broadly speaking, [is] in terms of national security and protecting individuals certainly through border security, stronger vetting processes, and looking at whether or not there are other regulations that we could put in place that would offer protection.”

When Brennan responded that neither Lanza nor the shooter in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock, were immigrants to the United States, Sanders stressed that she was “speaking more broadly” about security concerns in the nation as a whole.

“I don’t think there’s any one thing that you could do that would have prevented either one of those instances, those horrible, horrible tragedies,” Sanders said.

She also said the Department of Homeland Security was working on how to prevent mass shootings.

Click here for more on how educators and parents are thinking about violence in schools. Below is one of the videos that deals with providing teachers with firearms:

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