Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney Mick MulvaneyOn The Money: House panel pulls Powell into partisan battles | New York considers hiking taxes on the rich | Treasury: Trump's payroll tax deferral won't hurt Social Security Blockchain trade group names Mick Mulvaney to board Mick Mulvaney to start hedge fund MORE on Sunday defended President Trump Donald John TrumpSteele Dossier sub-source was subject of FBI counterintelligence probe Pelosi slams Trump executive order on pre-existing conditions: It 'isn't worth the paper it's signed on' Trump 'no longer angry' at Romney because of Supreme Court stance MORE's record in the wake of two mass shootings in which dozens of people were killed in less than 24 hours.

"This is a serious problem — there's no question about it — but they are sick, sick people, and the president knows it," Mulvaney said on ABC's "This Week." "I don't think it's fair to try and lay this at the feet of the president."

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At least 20 people were killed in a shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart on Saturday. At least nine people were killed in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning.

Mulvaney said Trump's first call after the shooting in El Paso, which claimed 20 lives, was to the attorney general "to find out what we could do to prevent this type of thing from happening, what we could do to send a message to the sick people who would do this type of thing."

ABC's Jonathan Karl pressed Mulvaney on the administration's record on gun laws and Trump's past statements about white nationalism. Multiple Democrats have blamed divisive rhetoric coming out of the White House for the El Paso shooting, in which the Hispanic community was apparently targeted.

"This is a serious problem ... but they are sick, sick people and the president knows that ... I don't think it's fair to try and lay this at the feet of the president," Mick Mulvaney says when asked why Trump downplayed the threat of white nationalism. https://t.co/Cw6CaMPTKg pic.twitter.com/qrRZaRLcTh — This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 4, 2019

Mulvaney defended the White House's actions on guns, pointing out it had enacted a bump stock ban and stronger background check system, and insisted that the president has denounced white supremacy.

"This was a sick person. The person in Dayton was a sick person. No politician is to blame for that. The people responsible here are the people who pulled the trigger," he said. "We need to figure out how to create less of those kinds of people as a society and not trying to figure out who gets blamed going into the next election."