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will commit additional acts of violence, it s more a question of when. welcome to thursday. this is meet the press daily. i m chuck todd. six asian women are dead when gunman aaron long went on a two-county rampage targeting spas in the area. while a motive has not yet been determined, the reality is this happened to have happened during a massive rise in asian american violence in this nation. a year after the prior administration referred to the pandemic as the china virus or the kung flu. now our leaders are being forced to recon with a ugly reality. two senior administration officials tell nbc news president biden and vice president harris will meet with asian american leaders when they visit atlanta tomorrow. flags are being flown at half-staff in honor of the victims and members of congress did something they said they have not done in more than 30 years, held a hearing on violence against asians and other americans. sitting and testifying about their experien ....
authorities say they are not ruling out that this was possibly a hate crime. president biden has ordered all federal flags to be flown at half staff in honor of the victims, and he will head to georgia tomorrow. and as the president said, as vice president harris said, as atlanta mayor keisha lance bottoms said, whatever the motivation here, the fact is attacks on asian americans are on the rise. people are rightfully scared and we need to do more to combat that bigotry and violence and stand together. to that point, today in congress a house committee held its first hearing on the rise of anti-asian discrimination in more than 30 years. but things quickly took a turn when republican congressman chip roy of texas first said that all americans deserve protection and to live in a free and secure society. then he said some more things, and i want to warn you, some of this language is offensive. we re only going to play it once, and we re going to play it once because i ....
looking at everything to make sure that we discover and determine what the motive of our homicides were. again, it s just very important to let you know that we are not done. in most cases of homicides, we don t have a quick apprehension. there s usually a lengthy investigation, especially when there s involving multiple victims. and so again, we re still working very diligently to ascertain all the facts so we can have a successful prosecution because that s what s most important now. so i was hoping that we would be able to release the names of the victims, but we are not able to do that at this time. and the reason is we need to make sure that we have a true verification of their identities, and that we made the proper next of kin notification. so again, i thought we were going to be able to do that, and out of respect of the lives and of the family, we want to make sure that we do that privately before we release the names of our victims publicly. again, you know, w ....
finances. so plenty to get to. we begin with explosive remarks today during a heated hearing on anti-asian hate crimes, two days after that deadly shooting in atlanta amidst a rising wave of anti-asian attacks that have been documented. it was the first hearing in roughly 30 years. that s the context for the republican s remarks. he said he wants justice for the victims in atlanta. he worries about policing free speech and invoked lynching, which broke a fiery rebuke from the democrat testifying. i think there is old sayings in texas about find the rope in texas and get a taller tree. my concern about this hearing is it seems to want to venture into the policing of rhetoric. your president and your party and your colleagues can talk about issues with any other country that you want. but you don t have to do it by putting a bulls eye on the back of asian-americans across the country, on our grandparents, on our kids. this hearing was to address the hurt and pain of o ....
three people in a gold s spa. then we are told he walked across the street and kill another woman at another spa. his car is shown at all three crime scenes. he was arrested driving south about 150 miles from atlanta. officials say 6 of the 8 victims appear to be asian and police are investigating the possibility that the attacks were racially motivated. this comes amid an increase in attacks on the asian community since the coronavirus pandemic. the new york police department says it will deploy counterterrorism in the city out of abundance of caution. we will keep following this story all morning and bring you any new developments as they happen. let s go now to the white house and coronavirus with the white house aiming to distribute more than 2 million doses of covid-19 vaccine in the next week. that would be a new record in the u.s. fight to contain the coronavirus. states are expected to receive more than 16 million doses of the three approved vaccines. that is ....