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Bush pushes back on calls for gun control: "Look, stuff happens"

In the wake of a fatal shooting at an Oregon community college that left ten dead and several more injured, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush pushed back against calls for stricter gun control legislation.

"Whenever you see the tragedy take place, the impulse in the political system - more often at the federal level, but also at the state level - is to do something," Bush said Friday at a conservative forum in Greenville, South Carolina. "And what we end up doing lots of times is to create rules on 99.999 percent of human activity that had nothing to do with tragedy."

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"I had this challenge as governor," Bush continued. "Look, stuff happens. There's always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

Bush's remarks mirror other statements from the GOP field.

Donald Trump told MSNBC Friday morning that "You're going to have these things happen and it's a horrible thing to behold, horrible."

"It's not politically correct to say that, but you're going to have difficulty, and that will be for the next million years, there's going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks," Trump said. "What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?"

In a press conference Friday, the president responded to Bush's comment, saying that "the American people should hear that and make their own judgment based on the fact that every couple of months, we have a mass shooting."

They can decide, Mr. Obama said, whether or not such massacres constitute "stuff happening."

The president called again for the politics behind gun control to change, and for the "behavior of elected officials" to shift.

"Our inaction is a political decision we are making," he said. He also placed the brunt of the blame on interest groups that "fund campaigns, feed people fear."

"Unless we change that political dynamic," Mr. Obama said. "We're not going to make a big dent in this problem."

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