Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As the nation’s non-ghouls struggled to grasp the worst mass-shooting in the history of the country yesterday, politicians and media types were already using the dead to leverage their agendas. Obama pushed for more laws like the “gun-free zone” law that enabled the attacker to kill with such impunity while Trump congratulated himself on forming a policy that wouldn’t have prevented the attack anyway, but still sounds good to his supporters.
That the fact a self-radicalized religious whack-job killed 50 people and wounded 53 more doesn’t actually support any argument made by any candidate won’t stop either Trump or Clinton (or by proxy, Obama) from using the tragedy to attempt to advance an agenda. That’s the nature of tragedy politics – point out how your ideas could have prevented the disaster while blaming the other side’s ideas for enabling it.
“Congress has become complicit in these murders by its total, unconscionable deafening silence,” Bloomberg gleefully quoted Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) in the same story where one paragraph earlier the author falsely and misleadingly asserts that AR-15 rifles were subject to a federal ban that was allowed to sunset in 2004. Such isn’t the case.
The same article ends with the sentence “His statement didn’t mention guns” after a ‘graph explaining that House Speaker Paul Ryan ordered the flags above the capitol lowered to half-staff. Bloomberg takes issue with Ryan not engaging in disaster politics, apparently.
CNN picked up a different thread in their coverage and brief interview with Hillary Clinton, pointing out Obama’s refusal to call Islamic terror by its proper name asking what terms Clinton would use to describe it.
“(The last thing we want to do is) to demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion… We can call it radical Islamism but we also want to reach out to the vast majority of American Muslims and Muslims around the world to help us defeat this threat,” Clinton told CNN.
Odd choice of words, I thought, “demagogue” and “demonize.” How often has she and her ilk stood before us after a tragedy and demagogically demonized an entire classification of rifle as well as everyone who owns one or might be interested in owning one? How often does her ilk demagogically demonize the National Rifle Association after a tragedy? Every time, and it’s early yet today.
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” tweeted presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump yesterday, and that statement was re-tweeted some 26,000 times for some reason.
Trump has, of course, proposed an indefinite moratorium on Muslim immigrants coming to the US until we can figure out “what the hell is going on.”
The shooter in yesterday’s attack at an Orlando gay bar was born in the United States. Trump didn’t explain how exactly his proposed moratorium would apply to the unborn.
The Washington Post, apparently rushing to feed the need to demonize the firearm used, posted a hilariously wrong piece on the AR-15 in which Christopher Ingraham exposes that he doesn’t know anything about the subject he’s tackling. After deferring to Mother Jones and their methodology of tracking mass shootings, which includes incidents where no actual firearms were used, he weighed in on the Clinton Crime Bill:
“’America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms,’ American-born al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn said in a video. ‘You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?’
Gadahn was incorrect on one point — fully automatic weapons, which shoot continuously when you hold down the trigger, have been banned since 1986. But he was correct on other the other points: Most states don’t require background checks for firearms purchased via private sales at gun shows. Most states don’t require showing ID to purchase a firearm from a private seller.”
Actually, all fully-automatic arms were heavily restricted and made subject to a special tax in 1934, but who cares about journalistic accuracy? Also, on that note, no state can enforce a requirement that private sellers perform background checks on buyers, so therefore most states don’t have them. Also, the vast overwhelming majority of people selling guns at gun shows are gun dealers, who must subject buyers to a background check. This “gun-show loophole” myth is so 90s. As in, that’s when it originated, and that’s the state of technology required for it to sound even remotely plausible to the uncritical thinker. It’s 2016 people, we have armslist-dot-com.
Next, Ingraham doubles down on the ignorance by trotting out one of my favorite “new ideas” the Left has had recently.
“Indeed, federal law allows people on terror watch lists to purchase guns, and thousands of them have done so.”
It bears, nay requires, mentioning that one needn’t be accused, let alone convicted of any crime to be placed on the FBI terror watch list. What Ingraham and many on the Left are advocating then is that we do away with due process and individual liberty and just deny basic human rights to people the FBI has, in their infinite and unflagging wisdom, deemed potentially dangerous. Yes, firearm ownership is a basic human right. And no, the FBI actually has no wisdom whatsoever.
That the Left has actually formed a newish idea is actually somewhat remarkable in and of itself; even if the idea has all the hallmarks of typical Leftist “thinking:” it tramples individual liberty, gives more power to the state and it wouldn’t actually work but sounds like it would as long as you don’t/can’t think about it too deeply. To clarify, the Left didn’t come up with this idea in response to this mass shooting; they tossed this one out over the still-warm bodies of the victims of an earlier tragedy.
Of course, thoroughly politicizing a tragedy requires dehumanizing it on some level, otherwise the ghoulishness becomes overwhelming. It can’t just be there are 50 people dead and therefore 50 grieving families and extended circles of friends in mourning today. It can’t just be there are a further 53 injured and suffering and therefore 53 families and circles of friends worrying and anguishing over their wounded loved one. Ignore all that, there’s blame to fix, points to score and an election to win, damn it. Never mind that no one is putting the blame where it belongs, or that the “points” are all being scored with fallacious arguments and outright lies. Again, there’s an election to win here.
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