From time to time, an event of national significance serves as a Rorschach test for whether you are on the left or the right. This is the case with the rampage in Tuscon this past Saturday. Enter Tom Brokaw:
To a leftist like Brokaw, a 22-year-old male shot 19 innocent people attending a rally in front of a Safeway, killing six, and nearly assassinating a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, and it’s the fault of… the gun. This is clarifying.
For those of us on the right, we have a different reaction. First we see a tragedy perpetrated by an individual capable of pure evil that should have been locked away from society years ago. We see a town Sheriff, who knew the evil individual had previously made death threats, suspiciously anxious to pass off blame to the political right (the famous quote from Hamlet comes to mind: he “doth protest too much, methinks”). And lastly, we wonder if more people in the crowd had concealed weapons on their persons, would Jared Lee Loughner have gotten off a whopping twenty gun shots, killed six people, and wounded a dozen more?
If there was more control over access to guns, would that really have prevented Jared Lee Loughner’s massacre? We’ll never know for sure, but bad guys have been able to get their hands on guns throughout American history, regardless of the law, and no intellectually honest person could think Loughner would have been deterred by government regulations.
Nonetheless, the gun control debate has been reignited, and apparently Mr. Brokaw believes the best way to honor Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and those most deeply affected by this nightmare is to use their pain and suffering to pressure society to take away guns from the very people who could have cut this killing spree short.
And that’s a tragedy in and of itself.