Of course: Obama jumps on Kalamazoo to push gun control

Before we get to Obama, a few other things about the shooting itself: The perp was married with kids. He had no criminal record. He had no history of mental illness. That doesn't mean he had no problems, of course, since all kinds of things can be going on in a person's life that don't get recorded in the public record - simply because they are kept private. That's why you really can't blame Uber for whatever happened with his background check. All a background check can tell you is what anyone knows, not what's happening exclusively behind closed doors, or maybe just in an individual's own mind.

There are some who can discern spiritually that something dark is going on with a person, but you can't expect a corporate background check to account for such things. In the mid-1980s, I attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. I'm pretty familiar with the city. It was bizarre to read the story of him weaving in and out of traffic and driving 80 on West Main, which in spots can barely even be called a major thoroughfare. Not nearly so bizarre, of course, as his driving from spot to spot and randomly gunning down people he did not know and had no connection to - then picking up Uber fares in-between killing stops. That said, the media are making far too much of the fact that he was an Uber driver, which is really something you do in your spare time and for most people not even their main job. It's like constantly referencing in headlines that he liked to go bowling. The last we heard of the 14-year-old victim originally reported dead was that she is still in critical condition and still fighting for her life, so as of now Dalton has only been charged with six counts of murder - and hopefully it will stay that way. I hope you'll all join me in praying for that community and for everyone touched by this evil. Now, on to Obama. You'll note that he doesn't sound quite as angry this time. It's not the Obama who usually takes the microphone after a mass shooting and rages on about how we've got another mass shooting that would never have happened if only these horrible Republicans would give me what I want and so forth. He didn't talk as long, didn't rant as loud - and apparently he came across as quite heartfelt when he called local officials to express his condolences.

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But he still politicized the event with what he said. Listen:

Watch @POTUS speak on the #KalamazooShooting and keeping the American people safe. https://t.co/kwtfK65AFQ

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 22, 2016

First, he reminds you that he took action on his own to put more gun control in place (unconstitutionally, by the way), and then he says that because of Dalton's crime, we still have to have more gun control. Well, let's consider that. Obama has said he wants expanded background checks so people with criminal histories or mental illness cannot get a gun. Even in today's remarks he referenced "someone like this" (presumably Dalton) as the kind of person we need to take steps to keep guns away from. Someone like what? He had no history of any of the things mentioned above. What exactly would you do to prevent Jason Dalton from legally buying a gun? The only thing you could do is the one thing liberals really want to do, which is to no longer understand the Second Amendment to mean ordinary citizens have a right to buy a gun at all. They would change the presumption of the Amendment to mean that you can get one only if the government specifically approves you for a reason the government thinks is legitimate, rather than saying you can get one unless someone finds a particular problem with you, which is what they pretend to want now because it's politically saleable. Jason Dalton is either the gunman who puts the lie to Obama's argument, or he's the gunman who changes it to something more forceful, perhaps turning it into this: Well no, we wouldn't have found anything on him, and yet look what he did. That's why we can no longer operate on the presumption that citizens have an inherent right to own firearms. If they want one, they must prove to us that they can be trusted and that they have a legitimate reason related to something we think is OK - but the presumptive answer is no, unless you demonstrate otherwise, not yes because of some "right will not be infringed" B.S. you right-wingers read into the Constitution. I don't think even this goes as far as they really want, which is to ban guns altogether, but I think this will be the next step in their journey to get there - and a guy like Dalton could well be the poster boy for that shift in the argument.