In what Twitchy staff called “as predictable as the sun coming up in the east”, the president used the Navy Yard memorial service as a venue to push his gun control agenda.
President Obama, addressing yet another memorial gathering after a deadly mass shooting, said Sunday evening that he senses “a creeping resignation” in the United States that homicidal lunacy like the Washington Navy Yard massacre “is somehow the new normal.” But he said “it ought to be a shock to us all” and should spur Americans to demand “a common sense” balance between gun rights and gun control.
“We cannot accept this,” Obama said of the Sept. 16 attack that killed a dozen people at the Navy Yard. “As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there’s nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
Despite what Obama says – mass shootings are not “the new normal.”
“There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston’s Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.
The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer.
You know what is the “new normal”? Democrats using memorial services to push their political agendas, apparently. Only eleven years ago, they paid a heavy price for turning Senator Paul Wellstone’s memorial service into a liberal pep rally. The backlash was immediate as the Governor walked out of the event, and in the following week, appalled Americans flooded talk show phone lines to complain about the partisan tone of the event.
But now we have the President of the United States deploying the political messaging tactics found in the Democrats’ 80 page anti-gun screed, “Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging” at a memorial service and to my knowledge, no one walked out.
Democrats aggressively pushing their anti-gun agenda in the wake of gun tragedies, anytime – any place, has become “the new normal.”
The Democrats’ anti-gun “guide” urges gun foes to speak out when a shooting “creates a unique climate” to shout down the National Rifle Association. Check!
“The most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak.” Check!
“The guide spells out how to talk about gun control and when to press the issue, the best time being in the wake of a publicized shooting. For example, it calls on gun control advocates to speak out, ‘don’t wait’ for the facts, after a shooting like Martin’s heightens awareness of the issue.” Check!
So what if the crazed shooter used Joe Biden’s weapon of choice – a shot gun – not the AR-15 Democrats want to ban. The idea is to “heighten awareness” about the issue. Good job, Mr. President, you did it!
Another problem many pundits missed was picked up by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:
“As President, I have now grieved with five American communities ripped apart by mass violence. Fort Hood. Tucson. Aurora. Sandy Hook. And now, the Washington Navy Yard. And these mass shootings occur against a backdrop of daily tragedies, as an epidemic of gun violence tears apart communities across America — from the streets of Chicago to neighborhoods not far from here.”
Fort Hood? The Obama administration has tried mightily to keep that labeled a case of workplace violence, but everyone knows that this was a case of radical jihad. Army Major Nidal Hasan had communicated with al-Qaeda recruiter and leader Anwar al-Awlaki, which a series of investigators managed to slough off over several months until Hasan launched his attack.
That wasn’t a case where a lack of gun control allowed the massacre to occur; Hasan used a legally-purchased semi-automatic pistol, which as an Army officer shouldn’t have proved too difficult to do. Some could argue that the Pentagon’s bar on carrying weapons forced victims to remain disarmed, just as it did at the Washington Navy Yard. Either way, the government failed in dealing with Hasan properly which lead to the terrorist attack, not lax gun laws leading to “workplace violence.”
It almost looks like the president is trying to shift blame for the Ft. Hood shooting away from government malfeasance to the lack of gun control.
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