Since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown,
Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, President Obama has made eight
public statements regarding gun violence. His
most recent remarks took place on Monday in Minneapolis.
In those remarks, President Obama has not only deplored the gun
violence that took place at Sandy Hook but the gun violence that
has taken place over the past couple of years in Tucson, Aurora,
Colorado and Oak Creek, Wisconsin. He has also made reference to
gun violence in cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia.
Consider these
remarks made by President Obama on January 16, 2013, which are
fairly representative of his statements over the past few
weeks:
The right to worship freely and safely, that right was denied to
Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The right to assemble peaceably,
that right was denied shoppers in Clackamas, Oregon, and moviegoers
in Aurora, Colorado. That most fundamental set of rights to life
and liberty and the pursuit of happiness — fundamental rights that
were denied to college students at Virginia Tech, and high school
students at Columbine, and elementary school students in Newtown,
and kids on street corners in Chicago on too frequent a basis to
tolerate, and all the families who’ve never imagined that they’d
lose a loved one to a bullet — those rights are at stake. We’re
responsible.
Well, what about the right of our military personnel to carry
out their oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies,
foreign and domestic? Surely that was compromised on November 5,
2009, when Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed a dozen military
personnel, one civilian and one unborn child at Fort Hood. Surely
these 14 people were also victims of gun violence.
And yet President Obama has not once seen fit to mention those
who died at Fort Hood during any of his public remarks on gun
violence over the past seven and a half weeks.
Now I am not the first person to mention Obama’s omission.
Following the vigil in Newtown in which Obama spoke of Tucson,
Aurora and Oak Creek, Mark Levin pointedly
asked, “What happened to Fort Hood? How come he didn’t mention
Fort Hood?”
But the fact that Obama still hasn’t uttered a word about Fort
Hood in this entire discussion about gun violence nearly two months
after the fact, it is a question worth asking once more.
From where I sit, there are two reasons that Fort Hood does not
traverse President Obama’s lips and both of them open a can of
worms for the White House.
The first reason is that, to this very day, the Obama
Administration does not recognize the massacre at Fort Hood for
what it was — a terrorist attack. They deemed it an act of
“workplace violence” despite the fact that Hasan screamed “Allahu
Akbar” as he slaughtered his fellow soldiers. They deemed it an act
of “workplace violence” though he carried business cards bearing
the inscription, “S of A — Soldier of Allah.” They deemed it an act
of “workplace violence” despite his contact with al Qaeda in
Yemen’s representative Anwar al-Awlaki; a man the Obama
Administration saw fit to kill with a drone nearly two years after
the Fort Hood massacre.
If Fort Hood was an act of “workplace violence,” then the
attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001 was the biggest act of workplace violence in American history.
Yet to characterize 9/11 as an act of “workplace violence” is to
utterly miss the point. So long as Obama insists that the Fort Hood
massacre was nothing more than an act of “workplace violence,” he
sullies the memory of those who died on November 5, 2009.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the death toll at
Fort Hood could have been much, much higher if not for two Killeen
police officers who shot and paralyzed Hasan. This brings me to the
second reason Obama does not mention Fort Hood. Unlike Tucson,
Aurora, Oak Creek, and Newtown, the assailant was subdued by people
carrying guns. Although police officers were responsible for
stopping Hasan, Obama sees guns as the problem, not part of the
solution. Thus it isn’t in his interest to mention Fort Hood when
discussing gun violence.
If President Obama really wants to have an honest national
conversation about gun violence, it would behoove him not to sweep
the Fort Hood massacre under the rug. But since when do demagogues
want an honest conversation about anything, especially where it
concerns our liberties?
Photo: WhiteHouse.gov
