I usually don’t draw attention to the comments section of my articles and blog posts, but this comment from my first post on the San Bernardino shooting warrants further comment of my own:
The wingnuts over at the NationalReview comments section are displaying the absolute worst of humanity. Jokes about Obama, California, mexicans….the usual.
I was hoping Spectator would at least wait until the dead bodies had cooled before making this political.
Why, in this awful situation, are your first thoughts about Obama and the left?
Can’t you just watch and, like, grieve for 5 minutes?
While I cannot speak for the people who see fit to comment at NRO or here at TAS, I can speak for myself. I stated that we could expect “lectures about gun violence from President Obama” and sure enough this is precisely what we got:
The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. And there are some steps we could take not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently: common-sense gun safety laws, stronger background checks.
President Obama said all this before the attackers were identified and before it was known that the weapons had been purchased legally. Let’s keep in mind that it was only two months ago when President Obama said that mass shootings are something “we ought to politicize” following the attack at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. It was also just over two weeks ago that Obama told HBO’s Bill Simmons in an interview published in GQ that he hoped gun control would be the dominant issue of the final year of his presidency. Obama stated, “And I will do everything I can to make sure that there’s a sustained attention paid to this thing.” So his quick statements concerning “common sense gun safety laws” following what happened yesterday in San Bernardino and last weekend in Colorado Springs are part of a political strategy of “sustained attention” to gun control.
If President Obama wants make gun control the centerpiece of his last year in the White House that is his prerogative. In turn, it is our prerogative to tell President Obama that he is wrong and that what he proposes will only harm law abiding citizens and will do nothing to prevent what occurred yesterday in San Bernardino.
