The Left’s politicization of the recent “mass shootings” in Texas and Ohio demonstrates a pathology that can only make normal governing and attaining solutions impossible.
Simply stated, normal people grieve and engage in self-reflection upon tragedy and the senseless loss of life. Sane Americans experience primordial pain when our nation hurts. Functioning folks and families may not like each other, but they pull together when a loved one succumbs to drug addiction; they don’t try to settle old scores when the body is barely in the ground.
If there are truly no “Obama judges” as U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts asserted this year, then we have to suspend knee-jerk accusations of “who is responsible” and fight the urge to “do something, anything” under duress. There are a million reasons “why” these two massacres happened, but at the end of the day, people who murder people are demented and/or are evil or at least responsible alone for committing atrocious, heinous acts, for whatever reason.
The people most wrongheaded on the Left for not staying in their own lane and acting like demagogues are former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and Hilary Clinton. All three could not resist pontificating on Twitter about gun violence to throw gasoline on the fire, and set a horrible example for the rest of the country. This type of after government service self-obsession all started many years ago with Bill Clinton, who became the first American president to refuse “to go away gently into the night” upon leaving the presidency, setting a precedent that Obama and the Deep State continue to practice in an attempt to crush the Trump presidency.
The Left is completely hypocritical labeling these two massacres as white terrorism. According to recent reports, there were 32 mass shootings while President Obama was president, but President Bush never castigated his successor. The Media is the Democrats and the Democrats are the Media. Both cry wolf all the time, and eventually nobody can take them seriously. The Media and Democrats care about one thing: excercising power; they don’t even care about the dead. Police say more than 30 people were killed this weekend by two gunmen in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, but did the national media also report that seven people were murdered in Chicago, and another 46 people injured in gun violence? No, they did not. More than 1,500 people have so far been shot in Chicago this year with 293 killed in a city run by Democrats that has the toughest gun control laws in the country.
How does the Left poison the debate?
Let’s look at some statistics. The number of deaths by homicide in 2017 was 17,284 – a little more than five per 100,000 people. But remove Democrat cities Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, and Chicago from the mix, and the homicide rate plummets to around two per 100,000 – in line with international averages. Interestingly, the murder rate in the United States has REMAINED CONSTANT for most of its entire history hovering between five and nine per 100,000 people. So, right now, we are on the bottom of that average. That means despite our violent, dysfunctional society, murder is at an historic low. By contrast, the number of people killed in 2017 by unintentional injury was 169,936. Do we ever consider outlawing unintentional injury?
Mass shootings are unfortunately not rare in the United States compared to the rest of the world, but to generalize them as the product of “white nationalism” is profoundly incorrect. In addition, the political climate is so poisoned by the Left that there is no trust to be had in “coming together” to limit these atrocities as we have attempted to solve other problems.
How does the Left poison the debate? The Left denies that there is a national emergency on the border with Mexico. They refuse to create a unified response of sealing the border and beginning the process of determining which immigrants are already here and what to do with them until we can have a merit-based immigration system. Another example of the Left’s intransigence: blocking school choice at every turn and doing the will of the teachers unions. This recalcitrance on the Left sentences poor, minority children to failure factory schools and a direct moving walkway to prison and continued poverty instead of giving parents the resources to send their children to the schools of their choice, which has proven to work everywhere.
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Gun deaths are tragic and gut-wrenchingly sad, especially in the case when victims are innocent children. They are a sad fact of American life. Nevertheless, the Left are the most cynical, disingenuous hypocritical people in this country and have neither the credibility, nor the mandate to further regulate individual gun ownership. Before we disarm the populace, let the Left “disarm” around their opposition to securing the border and giving poor minority children a better future in private schools instead of public ones. The Left’s insane belief in never “letting a crisis go to waste” is disgusting and deleterious to a functioning body politic. The Left needs to stand down with the accusations of racism around everything. Their ideology must be contained and ultimately defeated. We need to roll back socialism and the Entitlement Society as best we can. In conclusion, as said in the beginning of this article, it is psychotic, disgusting, and reprehensible to politicize gun violence in the midst of a national tragedy.
Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings. He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.
