Latest Obama gun control rationale: John Lennon’s bloody glasses

Days after the assault rifle ban died in the Senate, having failed to win the support of even 40 senators, President Obama is proving himself completely devoid of shame in his willingness to exploit emotion on this issue.

---

Not that it's going to get a bill passed into law - he knows that - but the idea is to portray himself as being on the side of the angels in the courageous fight against gun violence. Latest object of exploitation? John Lennon. Last night, Obama's Twitter account retweeted the following from Yoko Ono: So you see, if only we'd had gun control like Obama is proposing, John Lennon would still be alive and so would more than 1 million other people. One problem, of course, with all this (well, there are many problems, but this is the most obvious): Mark David Chapman shot Lennon with a .38 caliber pistol, not an "assault rifle" like the ones that would have been banned in Dianne Feinstein's failed bill. Now, Chapman did exhibit a lot of weird behaviors, and at one point was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. So if you wanted to be as shameless as Obama, I suppose you could argue that his long-term institutionalization might have saved Lennon's life. That would open the door to blame Democrats for the mass deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that occurred around this time. But that would be as ridiculous as trying to use Lennon as a prop in the gun control debate today. Yes, it's terrible that Lennon was shot and killed. It's terrible that all 1,057,000 of those people were shot and killed. But for reasons we've discussed ad nauseum here, there is no reason to think government gun control measures would have made a difference. And contrary to what Joe Biden would have you think, any attempt to restrict the possession and use of handguns absolutely presents serious Second Amendment problems. This issue has never been about anything but emotion. Not that Democrats wouldn't love to pass as much gun control as they can, with a ban on all guns being their ultimate dream. But they know it's not going to happen given the current configuration of Congress, so they're using it instead to manipulate the emotions of the electorate. That being the case, why not exploit John Lennon? Just because an assault weapons ban wouldn't have saved his life is no reason not to. That only matters if there was ever any honesty in this debate in the first place, and from the moment the Sandy Hook news broke, there never has been.