WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump urged Americans to embrace the "dignity of life" in the wake of the deadly school shooting in south Florida on Thursday but sidestepped the idea of amending gun laws to stem the nation's epidemic of mass shootings.
In a somber address to the nation from the White House, Trump urged listeners to "answer hate with love, answer cruelty with kindness."
Trump said he would visit Parkland soon. He ignored a reporter who shouted, "Will you do something about guns?"
Trump said only that he would work with state and local officials to "help secure our schools" and to "tackle the difficult issue of mental health."
The shooting took the lives of 17 people and terrorized an entire school and the community around it. The gunman, identified as a former student expelled for disciplinary reasons, returned to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and carried out the carnage with a semiautomatic AR-15, an assault weapon widely available for purchase in the U.S. with or without a background check. It is the same kind of gun used to kill 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
In the six years since that mass shooting, there have been at least 239 shootings at schools across the county, wounding 438 people and taking the lives of 138. A not-for-profit organization called Gun Violence Archive began tracking shootings a year after the Sandy Hook murders.
In a tweet earlier in the morning, Trump suggested that he does not see this event as a moment to talk about gun policy. The shooter was "mentally disturbed," he wrote, a problem the NRA argues cannot be addressed with gun control measures.
