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President Barack Obama to meet with families of shooting victims in Colorado
U.S. President Barack Obama. PHOTO/File
President Barack Obama again steps into the role of consoler-in-chief during a visit Sunday with distraught families of those gunned down in a minute and a half of horror at a midnight movie showing in Aurora, Colorado.
While authorities gather evidence on the suspect and the nation tries to fathom what drove the gunman, Obama planned to meet with loved ones struggling with pain and grief.
“We need to embrace them and let them know we will be there for them as a nation,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address.
Aurora’s police chief, Dan Oates, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the families “need that kind of contact by our elected leader. It will be very powerful and it will help them. As awful as what they’ve been through and what they’re going through has been, having the president here is very, very powerful.”
During the brief visit, just under 2 ½ hours, Obama plans to meet with officials in Aurora, where the shots rang out at a multiplex theater early Friday. Twelve of the victims died, and dozens were injured.
“I think the president coming in is a wonderful gesture,” said Aurora’s mayor, Steve Hogan. “He’s coming in, really, to have private conversations with the families. I think that’s totally appropriate.”
Hogan told ABC’s “This Week” that it “certainly means a lot to Aurora to know that the president cares.”
After the Colorado stop, Obama was to fly to San Francisco, where on Monday he’ll begin a previously scheduled three-day campaign trip that includes a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., fundraisers in California, Oregon and Washington state, and a speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans.
