Rick Perry: Dylann Roof ‘Gunned Down 9 Children of God’
Less than a day after former Texas Gov. Rick Perry accidentally referred to the Charleston church shooting as, erm, an “accident,” the 2016 GOP presidential candidate addressed the terrible events on Saturday morning.
Perry was speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Washington, D.C., and much of what he said concerned his condolences to the victims’ families and his heartbreak at the loss of these “nine children of God”:
“I think we all come here today with heavy hearts for those individuals in Charleston — those Charleston Christians — who were gunned down in an absolute heinous hate crime inside of their place of worship.”
Much of Perry’s remarks focused less on the event’s racial implications, as he chose to highlight the anti-religious nature of the crime:
“There is something more basic to our humanity than the color of our skin, our ethnic heritage, our nationality. It’s that we’re all made in the image of a loving God, and we cannot let hatred and violence break the ties that bind us together.”
Rather tellingly, the 2016 GOP hopeful referred to shooting suspect Dylann Roof as a “deranged individual” who “didn’t just take lives of black Americans,” but specifically “gunned down nine children of God.”
Perry later told reporters that he thought a renewed national discussion about gun control would be “healthy.” However, he cautioned against “the knee-jerk from the left” that demands all guns be banned and taken away from responsible gun owners.
[h/t CNN]
[Image via Shutterstock.com]
