During a press conference at the NATO Summit in Poland Obama said, “I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter. As we’ve seen in a whole range of incidents with mass shooters, they are by definition troubled.”
On Friday, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said that one of the suspects told authorities that his motivation for the shooting was that he was “upset about Black Lives Matter” and “wanted to kill white people,” especially white police officers.
Obama went on to say, “By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you, strangers, you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.”
“What I can say is that although he may have used as an excuse his anger about previous incidents, as has been indicated at least in the press, and as Chief Brown I think indicated, in no way does that represent what the overwhelming majority of Americans think,” Obama said.