President Obama Meets With Oregon School Shooting Victims’ Families

The signs refer to Umpqua Community College, where Christopher Harper-Mercer killed eight students and a teacher before turning the gun on himself after a shootout with police.

But when he emerged from the approximately hour-long meeting Friday, he said, “Today is about the families”.

The day of the shooting, Obama amplified his call for new restrictions on guns, including expanded background checks, and said lawmakers have failed to confront a deadly increase in mass shootings.

Diane Koenig, 56, who traveled to Roseburg from Kalama, Wash., to be part of the protest, said that “if there was a person there who had a gun” at the college when the shooting took place, “I think the outcome would have been different”. “It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel … and does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted elsewhere”, Obama said.

“The way things played out with Sandy Hook and the president parading those families across the country to take away my gun rights – that is why I’m here”, said Jason Harju, 40, who was wearing a.40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun on his belt and a sweatshirt that said “Oregun”.

Michael Johnson waits outside of Roseburg Municipal Airport for President Barack Obama’s arrival in Roseburg, Ore., Friday, October 9, 2015. But she said emphatically, “It wasn’t a discussion, it was a hug”.

Jan Cuddy, whose three daughters graduated from the community college, said she would like to believe Obama visited Roseburg because he was compassionate.

A few of the most poignant moments of Mr Obama’s presidency have occurred in his role as consoler in chief.

“My decision to be absent from Obama’s visit is exclusively based on my own principles”, Boylan shared on his Facebook page. The county commissioners tried to tamp down any suggestion that Obama was not welcome.

The publisher of the local paper, David Jaques, has also denounced the visit, saying Obama was not “welcome here to grandstand for political purposes”.

His trip came on the same day as two other school shootings, one in Texas and another in Arizona.

Republicans in Congress insist on having no new laws restricting the purchase and ownership of guns, citing the Second Amendment to the Constitution that gives the right for Americans to “bear arms”.

There were also a few religious references, one sign read “Prayers Not Politics”.

David Jaques, publisher of the weekly Roseburg Beacon, told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on Monday that local officials didn’t want Obama to visit.

Steven Jones, 18, told police he shot the group of students only after they hit him in the face and chased him, according to court documents.

Obama stated in his remarks that USA shootings are “something we should politicize”.