By Birmingham Times
On Sunday, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin appeared on MSNBC’s Politics Nation hosted by The Rev. Al Sharpton and said it was a “tough week” in Birmingham after a 62-year-old man with ALS and confined to a wheelchair was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting as well as two Mother’s Day shootings that left an 11-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl wounded.
Woodfin mentioned the violence after Sharpton asked about what happened Saturday night in Texas when former President Donald Trump said he had done more for Black people than Abraham Lincoln while receiving the endorsement of the national rifle association.
“When you hear Trump praising the NRA what goes through you mind?” Sharpton asked.
Woodfin replied, “It’s sickening. I think as a country related to gun violence, not just in urban cores but mass shootings as well … we’re the only country where this is an issue. You would think as the nation of the free world we would have solved this issue by now.”
“But it takes more than the President of the United States. We need men in women in Congress, in both houses, to have the fortitude to take on the NRA, to simply say ‘at what cost?’
“I think the cost has been more than burdensome for too many American families who have lost a loved one, including my own family, to gun violence, and that there is a better way but it takes fortitude and it takes elected officials to stand up to protect lives, particularly the most vulnerable, that being children as well as seniors,” Woodfin said.
Sharpton also asked Woodfin what southern cities like Birmingham would lose if President Joe Biden wasn’t re-elected. Biden delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College graduation ceremony earlier in the day. Woodfin is a Morehouse alum.
Woodfin said cities would lose advances in health care costs, such fighting big pharma and capping insulin costs, and rolling back laws on marijuana that have hurt families.
