In his speech on the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon last
week, President Obama sounded more upset about America's gun laws than
about the horrific massacre.
We barely had the preliminary
facts about the shooting, the shooter and the victims, and he was
already lecturing the nation again on gun control.
Instead of
calling the nation to prayer, he said we would learn about the victims
in the coming days and then "wrap everyone who's grieving with our
prayers and our love." Those words out of the way, he immediately
pivoted to complaining that "our thoughts and prayers are not enough.
It's not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger
that we should feel (or) prevent this carnage from being inflicted
someplace else in America -- next week or a couple of months from now."
We
didn't hear much "heartache and grief" in his speech, but his anger was
palpable. It wasn't anger at the shooter, and it wasn't sympathy for
the victims. It was outrage -- or apparent outrage -- at America's
Second Amendment advocates.
"We are the only advanced country on
earth," said Obama, "that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few
months. ... The United States ... is the one advanced nation on earth in
which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws -- even in
the face of repeated mass killings." He said these events happen so
often that they've "become routine. ... We've become numb to this."
He
may speak for himself, of course, but I don't know too many people,
especially gun rights advocates, who are numb to such savagery. Many of
us believe our society would be safer against gun violence if there
weren't so many "gun-free" zones and if we had more armed guards.
As
he has so often done before the powder is dry after similar incidents,
he used his bully pulpit (emphasis on "bully") to misstate statistics as
if he were trying for a record number of Pinocchios from fact-checkers.
He
said: "We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the
fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don't work -- or just
will make it harder for law-abiding citizens, and criminals will still
get their guns -- is not borne out by the evidence."
What he
conveniently omitted is that Oregon had recently strengthened its laws
on gun sales and is above average among the states on gun regulation. It
is one of only 18 states that require universal background checks
before the sale of any firearm.
Being a proud Chicagoan, Obama is surely aware that his beloved city,
which has distinguished itself in recent years for epic gun violence
and death, is in a state that has some of the strictest gun control laws
in the nation. How, then, can he claim that gun laws work? And how
would implementing his idea of "common-sense gun-safety laws" make
sense?
Though the United States has a high actual number of
fatalities from mass shootings given its larger population, Obama
ignores that other nations -- such as Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Israel
and Switzerland, which all have restrictive gun laws -- have higher
ratios of such shootings per capita.
The president also fails to
acknowledge author John Lott's findings as of 2010 that all the
multiple-victim public shootings (where three or more were killed) in
Western Europe and in the United States occurred where civilians were
not allowed to carry guns.
Charles C.W. Cooke, in his "The
Conservatarian Manifesto," urges that we regularly debunk "the claim
that America is in the midst of a gun-violence 'epidemic'. ... Two
reports, both released in May 2013, revealed a striking drop in gun
crime over the past twenty years." Cooke writes that "during the very
period that gun laws have been dramatically liberalized across the whole
country, gun crime has dropped substantially."
In his rant, Obama
didn't just distort the evidence. He effectively accused the Republican
Congress of allowing these deaths by opposing gun control laws for
political reasons, proving that projection is still an important weapon
in his partisan arsenal. At a time when he should be using his office
and his influence to urge healing and unity, Obama uses them for
strident community organizing to advance his agenda.
It is
instructive that Obama rages at conservatives and scapegoats the weapons
themselves rather than the criminals involved or the state of the human
condition that underlies their actions.
It is remarkable that he
demands an unconstitutional and meaningless change in the laws
purportedly to save innocent lives but vigorously opposes all laws that
would protect innocent babies in the womb.
And it is disgraceful
that he seeks to inflame our emotions to seduce us into ignoring the
facts and suspending our critical faculties long enough to surrender our
vital Second Amendment rights.
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