Obama: US not as divided as some suggest

By Kasim Ileri

WASHINGTON

A spate of recent high-profile shootings in the U.S. do not suggest a division within American society, President Barack Obama said Saturday.

During a press conference at the end of a NATO summit in Poland, Obama said the perpetrators of those crimes do not represent the communities they belong to.

"The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he's not more representative of all African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans,” Obama said referring to Micah Xavier Johnson, the alleged shooter in the murder of five Dallas police officers earlier this week at the end of a rally against police brutality.

The Charleston reference was to Dylann Roof who shot nine black churchgoers in South Carolina last July. “Or the shooters in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim-Americans. They don't speak for us.”

Obama said the U.S. is gripped in “sorrow, anger and confusion” but rejected the idea that deep polarization exist following the most recent fatal shootings of two black men by white police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota this week, then the killings of the officers in Texas.

"So we cannot let the actions of a few define all of us," he said. "America is not as divided as some have suggested. Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged about the inexcusable attacks on police."

Protests over the death of the black men continued Friday demonstrations in Washington DC, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

Hundreds of protesters attended a march in Phoenix, Arizona, that turned violent after demonstrators threatened to block a freeway and police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd.

The president has decided to cut short his European trip to return to the U.S. and will visit Dallas next week.

He said he will continue to push for tighter gun control regulations despite resistance from a Republican-led Congress that has been slow to take action on the required legislation.

"I am going to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight," he said. "We are not going to be able to identify, ahead of time, and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people. But we can make it harder for them to do so," he added.