Barack Obama: “When it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now.”

People need to “rediscover what’s the story we tell about how we’re going to live together, and see each other, and recognise each other, and disagree, and yet, still care for each other”.

It is a decision about how do we face and embrace this finite amount of time we have on the planet.

It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say.

A drift towards extremism was "not inevitable