The Week reports that
Obama decried the attack, which the FBI is investigating as a hate crime, for its allegedly racist undertones, and lamented the lack of tighter gun-control laws. "Once again, innocent people were killed because someone who intended harm had no trouble getting hands on a gun," he said. "At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence doesn't happen in other advanced countries... with this frequency."
Answer: of course it does happen in other advanced countries—Hungerford, Dunblane, Port Arthur in Australia, et cetera. I don't know about the frequency, but the massacres alluded to led to even stronger anti-self defense laws in Great Britain and Australia, and that led to a reign of criminal terror in London and the English countryside.
Also, why is the Kenyan-American Mr. Obama using the deprecated expression "advanced countries"? Well, the answer is that the levels of violence in non-advanced countries—Africa, and South America, for example—boggles the mind.
Here's a graph comparing the formerly advanced South Africa and still-advanced United Kingdom:
A BBC Graph well before the recent all time high.
Let's take another not entirely advanced country—China.
These headlines are from the blog The Truth About Knives, with review of knives for knife enthusiasts, industry stories, and this kind of general news knife story:
As you might expect, this kind of thing leads to calls for knife control:
After the Newtown Massacre, Colorado politicians passed some unpopular gun laws and were recalled, causing me to ask “Why Can Gun Grabbers Have A “Moral Panic” After An Immigrant Mass Murder, But Immigration Patriots Can’t?”
When Jamaican Colin Ferguson committed a mass murder, it was considered wrong to say it was a consequence of immigration, and the same with Virginia Tech.
So why isn't it wrong to attack the American public's Constitutional right to keep and bear arms after the mass murder of a group of people who obeying the current gun laws by being unarmed?