Never Let A Tragedy Go To Waste

Americans have grown so accustomed to the Democrats’ political strategy of cynically exploiting every tragedy that the Newtown, Connecticut mass murder barely moved the needle in their direction when they trotted out their latest gun control proposals. A CBS News poll found that only 26% of Americans believed that stricter gun control would prevent a similar tragedy. This is probably just about the fraction who believed that nonsense before Sandy Hook. A Gallup poll taken four days after the tragedy found that most Americans saw little benefit in an assault weapon ban. Americans ranked school security, improved mental health services and a moderation of Hollywood’s glorification of violence as more likely to succeed.

The tears were still flowing when the Democrats reached into their wish list file cabinet and started pulling out their favorite assaults on liberties. And private gun ownership is always one of their favorite targets. 

But the Second Amendment is not the left’s only target. Other than flag burning and pornography, the Democratic Party has never had much use for the First Amendment. 

Senator John Rockefeller has his sights set on violent video games and proposed a bill that would direct the National Academy of Sciences to study how video game violence translates into real violence. He and Joseph Lieberman also blamed movie and television violence for encouraging real violence.

The entertainment industry knew immediately that it would join gun owners in the crosshairs. Hollywood understands that its glorification of violence almost certainly contributes to violence in our culture. In a meaningless gesture, Hollywood delayed the release of its usual holiday season flood of violent films. And of course, they tried to divert attention from themselves and toward law-abiding gun owners.

Obama‘s eagerness to squeeze ever last drop of opportunity from tragedy even led him to exploit the Sandy Hook killings to advance his tax raising agenda: “After what we’ve gone through over the past several months, a devastating hurricane and now one of the worse tragedies in our memory, the country deserves the folks to be willing to compromise for the greater good.”

In Obama-speak, “compromise” means unconditional surrender by the opposition.

There really is no depth to which the left will not sink to advance its agenda. During the Nazi blitz of London in the summer of 1941, Britain’s communists tried to use the bombing to foment a revolution against the British government.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

The National Rifle Association’s executive director Wayne LaPierre enraged the mainstream news media and the Democratic Party with his entirely sensible proposal that public schools could be made safer with armed security.

When he made the proposal on NBC’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory mocked the idea: "You proposed armed guards in school. We'll talk about that in some detail in a moment. You confronted the news media. You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?," challenged Gregory.

Posting armed guards in schools is an idea so ridiculous that Bill Clinton proposed it in 2000. It’s an idea so ridiculous that, according to the New York Times, one third of all US public schools already employ armed security. 

I know my own high school had armed security more than four decades ago.

And it’s an idea so ridiculous that David Gregory sends his own children to a private school that has armed security, rather than to District of Columbia public schools that have no such security.

In truth, it is liberalism that gives us these mass killings, not the NRA. Liberals think that schools and movie theaters can be made safe by posting signs proclaiming gun free zones. In the last year, sixty school-age children have been killed in the gun-free zone known as Chicago. 

And the frequency of mass killings jumped dramatically after liberals made involuntary commitment of the mentally ill nearly impossible.

It’s worth noting that the news media themselves reward each mass murderer with a notoriety that encourages the next. Behavioral scientist Loren Coleman has written a book on the subject called “The Copycat Effect.”

And is it just me, or is there something jarring about receiving lectures on the evils of privately owned firearms from an administration that smuggled thousands of guns that it now wishes to ban to violent Mexican drug cartels?