Here’s Donald Trump’s latest ‘answer’ to the gun massacres plaguing his country – more mental institutions.
The president has repeated his claimed the killers behind recent mass shootings like El Paso and Dayton were mentally ill adding the US should build more institutions.
Trump said he and fellow republicans “don’t want to have insane people, dangerous people, really bad people having guns.”
“We don’t want crazy people owning guns,” the president told reporters in Morristown, New Jersey.
“It’s them. They pull the trigger. The gun doesn’t pull the trigger. They pull the trigger. So we have to look very seriously at mental illness.”
Trump is under pressure to curb gun violence following two mass shootings that killed dozens of people this month in Texas and Ohio.
His comments came as he started a trip from New Jersey to address a campaign rally in New Hampshire.
“We’re looking at the whole gun situation,” Trump said when asked whether he was pressing Republicans on tougher background checks for gun buyers.
Later on Thursday at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Trump said it was necessary to consider building new institutions for the mentally ill.
“We have to do it,” he said. “At the same time we will be taking mentally deranged and dangerous people off of the streets so we won’t have to worry so much about that. It’s a big problem,” he said.
In his comments in New Jersey, Trump said many US mental institutions were closed in the 1960s and 70s and their patients released onto the streets.
“We can’t let these people be on the streets,” he said.
A move toward deinstitutionalisation for the mentally ill began in the 1960s.
In a landmark case in 1975, the US Supreme Court ruled a person had to be a danger to himself or to others to be confined.