Watch RFK deliver speech on gun control in Roseburg, Ore., weeks before his assassination
Last week while delivering an angry call for action on gun control, President Obama said he had once visited the town of Roseburg, Ore., the site of America’s latest mass shooting.
“I’ve been to Roseburg,” Obama said at the White House, hours after nine people were killed and seven others wounded by a heavily armed gunman at Umpqua Community College. “There are really good people there.” The president is scheduled to travel to Roseburg on Friday.
Nearly 50 years ago, on the eve of the 1968 Oregon Democratic primary, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy delivered a campaign speech in Roseburg calling for stricter gun control measures.
“With all the violence and murder and killings we’ve had in the United States,” Kennedy said, “I think you will agree that we must keep firearms from people who have no business with guns or rifles.”
Kennedy lamented the ease with which people could acquire weapons, pointing out the case of a man sitting on death row in Kansas who was apparently able to buy a gun through the mail.
“At the present moment, a person who is insane, a man with a long criminal record of having killed a dozen people, can go in and buy a rifle,” he said. “Does that make any sense that you should put rifles and guns in the hands of people who have long criminal records, or people who are insane, or people who are mentally incompetent, or people who are so young that they don’t know how to handle rifles or guns?”
In a report about the speech, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite said Kennedy was met by protesters who felt “such legislation would deny their constitutional guarantees on the right to possess arms.”
The speech came more than four years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas — and two weeks before RFK was shot and killed by a gunman in Los Angeles.
