The Orlando shooting victims were barely taken away when Donald Trump hit Twitter with his usual self-congratulatory verbal diarrhea.
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016
He continued for the next two days, calling for President Obama to step down over the shooting. He even blamed the incident on Obama’s lack of toughness on Islamic terrorists. He also renewed his call for a ban on Muslims coming to the U.S., and even promised to stop immigration from all nations with a history of terrorism.
(You have to wonder if he means Ireland, Israel, Ukraine, as well as Saudi Arabia? That would go over well……)
Now the Huffington Post is reporting that the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) lobbying director has doubled down on Trump’s blame game. He is trying to lay the responsibility for the massacre on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Chris W. Cox, the NRA’s lobbying director, wrote an op-ed in the USA Today, and in that compilation of ridiculously twisted logic, Cox said:
“In the aftermath of this terrorist attack, President Obama and Hillary Clinton renewed calls for more gun control, including a ban on whole categories of semi-automatic firearms. They are desperate to create the illusion that they’re doing something to protect us because their policies can’t and won’t keep us safe. This transparent head-fake should scare every American, because it will do nothing to prevent the next attack.”
As a side note, this guy presumably helped the NRA to bribe Republican Senators into defeating the Manchin-Toomey bill after the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Cox went on to accuse the FBI of failing to arrest the shooter when they investigated him in 2013 and 2014. The truth is, they didn’t arrest him because he hadn’t committed any crime. There was no evidence that he was planning one.
The NRA still seems to think that the Obama administration should have grabbed and held him.
The NRA seems to believe that we should arrest anyone who speaks against the government or uses threatening, racist language. That would certainly put Donald Trump at considerable risk.
Of course, the NRA won’t say that there was significant evidence that the murderer was mentally confused. During the investigation by the FBI, the man claimed allegiance to every Islamist group he could think of, completely ignoring the fact that many of them are sworn enemies.
He obviously wasn’t highly involved with ISIS or any other group since he couldn’t even tell them apart.
His ex-wife also claimed that he was physically abusive and prone to violent rages. His father said that he was upset because he saw two men kissing. There is also evidence that he actually visited Pulse more than once, sometimes becoming aggressive.
That doesn’t matter to the NRA, though. Like Donald Trump, they want to pretend that this is not just another case of an angry bully who bought himself a deadly weapon. They want to ignore the fact that the United States of America has more gun deaths than Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, or Poland.
We have more guns per capita than any nation on earth. They want to turn a blind eye to the fact that there were no radical Muslims at Columbine or at Sandy Hook. There was no ISIS sympathizer in Aurora or Tucson.
The NRA and Donald Trump are lying. They want to blame two Democrats, both of whom have worked to limit reckless access to guns, for the latest in a long series of mass shootings.
They want us to forget that it isn’t ISIS, or Islam, or homophobia, or political correctness that makes this country the champion of gun death.
Nope, it’s the guns. Pure and simple.
It’s the damned guns.
