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 The responses to the attack in Charleston, in which a white man is
suspected of killing nine black people at a historic church, showed
the contrasting pressures facing White House hopefuls in each party
as they prepare for primary contests.
Clinton and other Democrats are appealing to a racially diverse
voter base that has been frustrated by an inability to tighten gun
laws after other mass shootings. Those voters are also increasingly
vocal about heavy handed law-enforcement tactics in black
communities following a series of police killings of unarmed
African-American men.
Republicans, meanwhile, have successfully loosened gun restrictions
across the country in recent years while catering to core voters who
are overwhelmingly white.
Clinton cited past mass shootings as she called for the United
States to confront the toll taken by racial prejudice and gun
violence. "How many people do we need to see cut down before we
act?" she said in Las Vegas.
 Several Republican candidates issued statements expressing
condolences in the wake of the attack. But unlike Clinton and
President Barack Obama, they did not call for action to reduce
similar attacks. Few were willing to label the murders a hate crime,
although police in Charleston said the attack was racially
motivated.
"There's a sickness in our country, there's something terribly
wrong, but it isn't going to be fixed by your government," the
libertarian-leaning Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told a group of
religious conservatives in Washington. "It's people not
understanding where salvation comes from."
Speaking at the same event, Texas Senator Ted Cruz did not mention
the race or possible motivation of the suspected shooter,
21-year-old Dylann Roof. The young man's Facebook profile showed him
wearing a jacket emblazoned with flags of apartheid-era South Africa
and of the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, both formerly ruled by
white minorities.
"A sick and deranged person came and prayed with an historically
black congregation for an hour and then murdered nine innocent
souls,” Cruz said, without referring to the race of the shooter.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a leading contender, did not mention
the attack in his 20-minute speech.
There is little incentive for the Republican Party to press deeply
into the episode since the party's voters overwhelmingly favor
expansive gun rights.
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Their opposition, backed by the powerful National Rifle Association,
ensured Obama failed in his bid to expand background checks on gun
buyers after a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults in
Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.
Obama acknowledged on Thursday that further efforts in Washington to
tighten gun controls were likely to be futile, saying the "politics
in this town foreclose" attempts to limit gun rights.
Americans, too, are divided on the subject of gun control, with 48
percent supporting government restrictions and 41 percent saying
they should not be regulated, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll
taken in April. Some 61 percent of Republicans oppose firearms
regulation, while Democrats support it by an equal proportion.
Beyond the gun issue, the voters who will choose the next Republican
nominee are overwhelmingly white - in 2012, they made up 90 percent
of voters in the Republican primary contests.
That means there is little incentive -- and perhaps a real downside
-- for conservatives to grapple head-on with racial tensions spurred
by the Charleston shootings.
Some comments by voters at the event attended by Paul, Cruz and
others bore that out.
“I'm tired of hearing that every time someone shoots someone from
another race that it's racially motivated,” said John Cartree, 78,
of Columbia, Mo.
(Additional reporting by Amanda Becker; editing by Stuart
Grudgings.)
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