Trump calls for unity after 11 killed in synagogue shooting

Bloomberg

Donald Trump condemned “all forms of evil,” including anti-Semitism, after a mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 people dead in what’s being investigated as a hate crime.
“We mourn for the unthinkable loss of life that took place today,” the president told a gathering of young farmers in Indianapolis, pledging the full resources of his administration to investigate the crime. “Our nation and the world are shocked.”
Trump pressed ahead with a campaign rally in southern Illinois Saturday night, where his roughly 70-minute remarks were more sotto voce than usual. He veered little from his usual script, though, of attacking Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Maxine Waters of California.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to tone it down a little bit, do you mind?” Trump asked the crowd assembled at an airport hanger at Southern Illinois Airport. It’s time, said Trump, to “renew the bonds of love and loyalty that sustain us as Americans.”
Barnstorming in an effort to hold on to Republican majorities in Congress in the November 6 midterms, the president has eight or more rallies planned, from Florida to Montana, over the next week. He said on Saturday he would also go to Pittsburgh in the wake of the shooting.
Earlier, before boarding Air Force One, Trump said the Pittsburgh incident may have ended differently had there been armed personnel inside the synagogue. The comment could reopen a bitter debate over gun-control laws and the political influence of the National Rifle Association, less than two weeks from midterm elections.
“If they had some kind of a protection inside the temple maybe it could have been a very much different situation,” Trump said, adding that the US should “stiffen up” its death penalty laws. Earlier, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement that the Department of Justice will file hate crimes and other charges against the defendant, including ones that could lead to the death penalty.

History of Shootings
“We believe this is the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States,” the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, said in a statement.
Trump joined his daughter Ivanka Trump, who converted to Judaism upon her marriage, and Vice President Mike Pence in condemning anti-Semitism. He told reporters on Air Force One that he’d spoken to the mayor of Pittsburgh, to Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania’s governor, and to his daughter and her husband Jared Kushner about the shooting.
Places of worship, from churches to a Sikh temple, have been common sites of fatal shootings in the US. That includes the 2017 shooting at First Baptist Sutherland Springs in Texas that left 26 dead, and the murder of nine parishioners, all black, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Colombia, South
Carolina, in 2015.
Meanwhile, a movement to arm teachers took root earlier this year after the massacre of 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.