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Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper says he's not willing to accept shootings as "the cost of freedom"
He also criticized "inflammatory rhetoric" about politics online and on television programs
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper says he’s not willing to accept deadly shootings like the one at a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday as “the cost of freedom.”
“We’ve got to try and keep guns out of the hands of people who are violent and unstable,” the Democratic governor said Sunday in an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar on “State of the Union.”
His comments came less than two days after the shooting that killed three people in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.
Hickenlooper listed the shootings along with the racially motivated slayings in Charleston, South Carolina, and the shootings on an Oregon college campus.
“Detailed plans probably aren’t appropriate, but I think we have to come back and look at all aspects of why these shootings have continued to occur – you know, in Oregon, or South Carolina or Colorado,” Hickenlooper said.
“The frequency is unacceptable, and I don’t – I’m not willing to say, ‘Well, we just have to sit back and accept this as the cost of freedom,’ ” he said. “I think we have to really look at, how do we address – how do we make sure that people who are unstable, who have violent histories, if somehow a level of domestic violence made it much more difficult to get a weapon, maybe we’d not only keep our communities safer, but also cut down on domestic violence.”
He criticized blogs and television programs – though didn’t name any specifically – that he said have harsh political rhetoric.
“The intensity of rhetoric sometimes seems to pull a trigger in their brain,” Hickenlooper said. “They lose contact with what reality is.”