Obama trying to deflect attention from institutional racism: Analyst

US President Barack Obama is raising the issue of gun reform in order to deflect attention away from institutional racism in the United States, American writer and political commentator Solomon Comissiong says.

On Wednesday night, a white gunman opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, leaving nine African Americans dead.

Obama said the shooting has once again reminded us of “a dark part of our history" and the need to tighten gun control laws.

“It’s pathetic that President Obama directed attention immediately to gun control,” Comissiong told Press TV on Friday.

“Yes, there’s a gun control issue in the United States, but what happened [on Wednesday] was not entirely about gun control, it was about a culture in the United States that has long made permissible for [white] people to harm black people with almost utter impunity, especially when it comes to law enforcement,” he added.  

“[Obama] was doing what he normally does, and that’s to deflect attention away from the issue of race [and] institutional racism,” he stated.

Comissiong said that Obama has “no qualms whatsoever to label protesters in Baltimore as thugs, but when it comes to murderous police officers, that are armed to the teeth, that have military armament and military-grade weapons throughout the United States, and when they are using these weapons on people - mostly unarmed black and brown people - he doesn’t say anything about that, never doesn’t say anything that institutional racism is riddled through the institution of police in America and it needs to be deconstructed to be reconstructed, or it needs to be completely revamped, something along those lines.”

Every year, more than 30,000 people are shot and killed in the United States. The US averages 87 gun deaths each day as a function of gun violence, with an average of 183 injured.

“I do not think that the problem is entirely upon gun control. Yes, there is a gun control issue here. Three hundred million guns are floating around in the United States of America… so it’s almost a gun for each American,” Comissiong stated.

“Yes, there is an issue but the deeper issue is… the killings of scores of black people by law enforcement with those guns,” he noted.

“What about the guns in the hands of police officers and police departments that have institutional racism riddled through them. What about those guns? What about those black victims?” he asked.

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