Obama's Disgraceful Demagoguery In The Wake Of The Oregon Community College Shooting

 





Obama didn’t wait to hear the facts about the horrific shooting at an Oregon community college before launching into a tirade aimed at advocates of gun rights. The president strode into the White House briefing room to make the following statement: “I’d ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws, and to save these lives and let these people grow up.” He also said his critics would accuse him of wanting to “politicize” the issue but followed that by claiming that this was something “we should politicize.” Of course, the president had no idea whether the 26-year-old man who committed this massacre had obtained his weapons in a manner that might have been prevented by a change in the laws. Indeed, in previous instances where he made such a call after a shooting, it turned out that the stricter restrictions on gun sales he advocates wouldn’t have stopped the slaughter. Faced with another shocking crime, his priority was, regardless of the facts, to establish a scapegoat for the Oregon shooting in the form of the National Rifle Association and its supporters.


But even as the nation began to mourn the ten persons who had been slain, we did know that the shooter was singling out Christians at Umpqua Community College for murder. So perhaps instead of recycling the same tired rhetoric about guns, we could be talking about the way many Christians have demonized in the media for their beliefs. Surely had the shooter singled out some other group more favored by pop culture or liberal sensibilities this might have been the lead and even the focus of a presidential statement. But instead, Obama and his cheering section in the liberal media immediately sought to use the incident to ride their favorite gun control hobbyhorse. In the absence of proof to the contrary, we also already know that it’s unlikely that a person bent on mass murder would or could be deterred or even stopped by new gun laws.

Let’s concede that the question of mass shootings is something that ought to trouble all Americans. Such massacres do appear to be more statistically likely to happen in the United States than other nations. Moreover, the availability of legal guns makes it easier for such slaughter to occur. But as much as we share the president’s frustration about these horrors, it is still incumbent on him to connect the dots between these crimes and his proposed solutions that he trots out in knee-jerk fashion any chance he gets. Yet that is something that he does not even try to do, relying instead on the notion that if a gun was involved, the fault must be the existing gun laws rather than the insanity, criminality, or prejudice of the criminal.