Gibbs: Actions Of Alleged AZ Gunman "Not American"

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs today rebuked the notion that alleged Arizona gunman Jared Lee Loughner was exercising his constitutional rights when he killed six people and wounded dozens more during an attempt to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last weekend.

Gibbs’ voice reached a crescendo during his response to a question of whether Loughner had the “freedom” to exhibit violence at the site of Giffords’ townhall event.

“I would disagree vehemently with that,” Gibbs said. “There is nothing in the values of our country, there’s nothing on the many laws on our books that would provide for somebody to impugn and impede on the very freedoms that you began with by exercising the actions that that individual took on that day.”

“That is not American,” he added.

Gibbs also said during his roughly hour-long briefing that President Barack Obama will look for opportunities in the coming weeks to further promote civil discourse, a theme he addressed somewhat during a primetime speech to the nation Wednesday night in Tucson. However, Gibbs cautioned that scaling down the often heated tone of the country’s political environment would require a national effort.

“We are not gonna remove disagreement from our Democracy,” Gibbs said. “And we shouldn’t.”