Trump’s praise of the National Rifle Association at a weekend event in Texas was “sickening,” Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said during a Sunday interview that also touched on gun violence in the city.
Woodfin appeared on MSNBC’s Politics Nation hosted by The Rev. Al Sharpton during which the mayor talked about the Morehouse College graduation ceremony he had attended earlier in the day. President Joe Biden gave the commencement speech. Woodfin is a Morehouse alum.
Sharpton asked Woodfin what southern cities like Birmingham would lose if Biden wasn’t re-elected. Woodfin said they would lose advances in health care costs, such fighting big pharma and capping insulin costs, and rolling back laws on marijuana that have hurt families.
But then Sharpton turned to what happened Saturday night in Texas when Trump said he had done more for Black people than Abraham Lincoln while receiving the endorsement of the national rifle association.
Sharpton also noted the gun violence Birmingham has faced, including a Wednesday press conference Woodfin held after a 62-year-old man with ALS and confined to a wheelchair was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting as well as two Mother’s Day shootings in Birmingham that left an 11-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl wounded.
“When you hear Trump praising the NRA what goes through you mind?” Sharpton asked.
Woodfin said it was a “tough week” related to gun violence in Birmingham and he’s glad the two children survived.
As far as Trump’s comments, Woodfin said “It’s sickening. I think as a country related to gun violence, not just in urban cores but mass shootings as well … we’re the only country where this is an issue. You would think as the nation of the free world we would have solved this issue by now.”
“But it takes more than the President of the United States. We need men in women in Congress, in both houses, to have the fortitude to take on the NRA, to simply say ‘at what cost?’
“I think the cost has been more than burdensome for too many American families who have lost a loved one, including my own family, to gun violence, and that there is a better way but it takes fortitude and it takes elected officials to stand up to protect lives, particularly the most vulnerable, that being children as well as seniors,” Woodfin said as the 8-minute interview ended.