Obama went to Roseburg, Oregon yesterday to meet with some of the people mourning the victims of the shooting there.

President Obama, visiting a city Friday where emotions are still raw from last week’s shooting massacre, was alternately berated by hundreds of demonstrators and warmly embraced by many survivors of the victims.

The president met privately for about an hour with about 40 people, including survivors of at least three of the nine dead, and made only a short public statement afterward. Many in the community have said they were angered by his pro-gun-control remarks hours after the shooting at Umpqua Community College.

Imagine the students and teacher killed at Umpqua Community College had been blown up by a bomb instead of shot with guns. I wonder if many in the community would have said they were angered by his remarks condemning terrorist bombing hours later.

The shooter at Umpqua Community College was able to do what he did because it’s so easy to get guns and ammunition here. Why be angry at Obama for saying so?

“I’ve got some very strong feelings about this, because when you talk to these families, you’re reminded that this could be happening to your child, or your mom, or your dad, or your relative or your friend,” Obama somberly told reporters after meeting with survivors at Roseburg High School. “And so we’re going to have to come together as a country to see how we can prevent these issues from taking place. “

Remember Charleston? Remember the extraordinary people who were killed there? By another guy who had been able to get a lot of guns and ammunition with no trouble? That was just a few weeks ago.

One woman, leaving the high school after meeting the president, refused to stop for an interview. But she said emphatically, “It wasn’t a discussion, it was a hug.”

She was likely referring to the noisy discussion taking place at the airport – where he helicoptered in from Eugene – and outside the high school, where most of the demonstrators made it clear that they didn’t welcome him to Roseburg.

“Just by being here, he politicizes” the shooting deaths, said Chuck Cooper, a retired homebuilder from Oakland, Oregon, arguing that the president’s goal was not to console victims but to build support for new restrictions on guns.

See that’s just completely inane. It presents the goal of restricting guns as somehow starkly unrelated to the agony of the victims. It presents Obama’s desire to make guns less easy to get as a sinister, “political,” self-serving goal that’s opposed to his purported goal of consoling people who need consoling because their loved ones were murdered by means of easy to get guns. There’s no opposition here, no lack of relation – the two are the same issue. Easy access to guns makes it way too easy to murder people. There’s nothing else like them for that. Knives are much more up close and personal, and risky to the would-be murderer. Poison is no use for those times you want to murder a whole roomful of people in a hurry. With a gun, you can stand at a safe distance and kill people before they can grab your arm or knock your legs out from under you. Easy access to guns is not a social good, because a high rate of murder is not a social good. This isn’t some sinister random “politicizing” move, it’s the reality.

A large banner, “Obama Go Home,” was hung at the entrance to the airport, and signs berated his stands on guns while others praised the local sheriff, John Hanlin, for his past insistence that he wouldn’t enforce gun restrictions he regarded as unconstitutional.

At one point, a truck raced past the airport crowd as a young man leaned out the window joyfully waving a Confederate flag.

A fan of Dylann Roof, no doubt.