Obama: Virginia shooting shows gun control is more urgent than fighting terrorism

We touched yesterday on the left's out-of-the-gate seizing on the Roanoke shooting to kick off the latest gun control push. It's what they do, and no one was surprised that they did it - tinged as always with warnings like "we can't wait any longer," which imply, I guess, that everyone knows the left's gun control agenda would stop killings like this, and we're all just dragging our feet because the approval of the NRA is more important than the lives of folks like Alison Parker and Adam Ward.

That's the implication, and it's hardly new. They dropped it after Charleston. They dropped it after Newtown. They always drop it. They never explain how the laws they want would stop a determined killer like Vester Flanagan - who cares nothing for his own life - from getting a gun legally or otherwise. But that's not really the point. The point is to turn an act of evil to their advantage in the news cycle, and they're as dependable as the sun rising in the east in their willingness to take the cue. But now that Obama himself has waded into the game, pay attention to something else. As he jumps into the tired contrast between gun crimes and terrorism, listen to the tone in his voice as he references the latter. What do you hear? If you want some hint as to why Obama and Kerry didn't demand an end to Iran's support of terrorism in their nuclear negotiations, this should tell you all you need to know. Obama considers the whole idea of terrorism as a real threat to be ridiculous. Listen to the tone in his voice again if you're not sure. There's no room in his left-wing frame of reference for counterterrorism as a serious priority, and it shows in the way he talks about it here. We'll have to see full interview later to find out where he's going with the "we're willing to spend . . ." comment, but we can hazard a guess, can't we? Obama laments that we spend billions fighting terrorism when, or so he says, lots more people are killed by gun crimes.

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By the way, we might look at that in what James Taranto would headline under "Fox Butterfield, is that you?" If fewer people are being killed by terrorism, that's not an argument to stop spending so much money fighting it. It's an argument to keep spending so much money fighting it, because it's working. It actually seems to bother Obama that not more people aren't getting blown up, not because he wants people blown up but because it's using up money he'd rather spend taking your guns away from you. This is one of the reasons I miss George W. Bush, and continue to believe he was a much better president than today's orthodoxy suggests. When Bush talked about terrorism, there was a conviction in his voice that expressed how much it really mattered to him that the victims of these monsters be protected. And his actions backed up his words. People like Barack Obama, by contrast, lamented that the terrorists were being treated too harshly with their lengthy detentions at Gitmo, and with the harsh interrogations that upset fair-weather friends around the world. The problem for Obama is this: Fighting terrorism is a clear national security imperative, whereas the fight against crime is a) a local one; and b) not something the federal government can take on in the manner Obama prefers without butting up against this little thing called the Second Amendment. And since he has yet to persuade the nation to change any of that, he is left to take individual acts of horror and tragedy as his own personal cue to lament that people won't embrace his gun-grabbing agenda. It takes a special kind of narcissist to make something like the Roanoke shooting all about himself, but that's who 51 percent of you wanted in the White House, isn't it?

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