Less than a week ago, Democrats eviscerated President Trump for “politicizing” the New York City truck attack. That was an attack with a clear cause (Islamic terrorism) and clear solutions (increased monitoring of internal threats, increased vetting of immigrants from countries with known terrorism issues, and increased military action against terrorist groups overseas).
On Sunday, at least 26 worshipers were killed at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. There was no clear cause for the shooting, at least as of Sunday night, and — unlike what Democrats might like to think — no clear solutions to prevent it.
In fact, as of the early hours of Monday morning, we didn’t even have all the facts with regard to alleged shooter Devin Patrick Kelley and his background or how he was stopped, although early reports did credit an armed resident with chasing the 26-year-old shooter off, according to Fox News.
That didn’t stop former President Barack Obama from “politicizing” the incident — you know, that thing Democrats suddenly think is very, very bad — on Twitter.
“We grieve with all the families in Sutherland Springs harmed by this act of hatred, and we’ll stand with the survivors as they recover,” Obama wrote Sunday night.
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“May God also grant all of us the wisdom to ask what concrete steps we can take to reduce the violence and weaponry in our midst.”
We grieve with all the families in Sutherland Springs harmed by this act of hatred, and we’ll stand with the survivors as they recover…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 6, 2017
May God also grant all of us the wisdom to ask what concrete steps we can take to reduce the violence and weaponry in our midst.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 6, 2017
There’s plenty of weasel-room in there for Obama to say he was just suggesting that it was time to “ask what concrete steps” we could take, so let’s unpack this one for all of its hypocrisy.
We’ll focus on the second tweet, since there’s nothing prima facie offensive about it — at least not without the second tweet, which makes it clear he’s using bodies not yet cold in the morgue to appeal to America’s emotions.
Obama talks about “concrete steps.” In his world, this means legislation. Unfortunately, reactive legislation (especially involving firearms) has a history of ending up badly. Furthermore, given an almost total paucity of facts, we don’t know there’s a single piece of legislation that could have stopped Sunday’s massacre.
That fact goes unsurprisingly unmentioned by the president. I’m sure he meant to mention it, but Twitter being what it is, it’s hard to pack everything into 140 characters and something had to go.
It’s the final sentence that’s the pièce de résistance of weasel-wording: according to Obama, the measures should be meant to “reduce the violence and weaponry in our midst.”
Now, nobody wants more violence. (Or, well, nobody sane wants more violence.) However, Obama then sneaks in a causal link — it’s the “weaponry in our midst” that causes the violence and therefore must be reduced.
He provides no evidence for this, probably because there isn’t a whole lot of it. In fact, if Barack Obama was in the habit of reading his own FBI’s reports on crime, he would have found that the “assault weapons” so often scapegoated in the aftermath of tragedies like this kill less people than knives or even hands.
This is the reason why conservatives get weary of Democrats politicizing shootings. They do so usually without the benefit of facts, using specious logic that could be debunked if they looked at any of the pertinent statistics and studies that have been compiled.
That’s the difference between “politicizing” an Islamist terror attack and politicizing a mass shooting. One is simply an issue of stating facts too many people would wish to ignore. The other involves ignoring the facts and instead placing the blame on our constitutional rights.
H/T The Daily Caller
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