Monday, August 5, 2019

A painful truth

The news hit the nation hard this past weekend.

Two more mass-shootings.  Dozens killed and wounded.  Families and communities torn apart by violence.  And once again, the nation mourns senseless violence.

It's early Monday morning right now, so there's only a limited amount of information available.  But it is beginning to look like both of the shooters left trails behind them.  The San Jose shooter claims he was “radicalized” long before Trump, which would mean “during Obama’s presidency”.  The Dayton shooter was suspended from school twice for making threats, and the kids in school knew he could be dangerous.

Once again, the signs were there and nobody in authority did anything.

Once again, the claim is the “easy availability of assault weapons”.

Once again, the leftists are blaming Trump for “stoking racism”.

It’ll eventually come out that both of these shooters were known but weren’t on a “watch list”.  Psychologists will say that that, before the violence, they were “just kids expressing the normal anger that kids express”.  Authorities will claim their “hands were tied”.  Others will say that they "knew the kid was trouble" but kept to themselves.  And once again, there will be recriminations based in the fantasy that "if we had better gun laws, these shootings wouldn't happen".

The usual calls for gun control have already gone out: more demands for laws that wouldn’t have prevented these tragedies from occurring, more calls for anti-Constitutional restrictions on 2A, more demands for the elimination of legal gun ownership.  All in the false belief that a new law - any law - would prevent more events like this.

But nobody will call for additional restrictions and “watch lists” for people who have exhibited signs of serious antisocial activity.  Nobody will make the connection between the unpunished violence of AntiFA and the acceptance of violence as a means of protest.  Nobody will propose that HIPAA rules be modified to allow truly psychotic individuals (such as Adam Lanza) or those being treated by anti-psychotic drugs to be added to background check lists.

(Yes, there is a legitimate fear that nonviolent individuals with mild mental diseases (such as Downs syndrome individuals or elderly nonviolent Alzheimers patients) will be added to the rolls of those who may not possess firearms.  The question of "prior restraint" immediately comes to mind.  But this is a false equivalence: those who are taking anti-psychotic drugs are doing so for a reason.

No, I don't want to get into a long harangue about mental disease here.  This isn't a comment on mental illness.  It's a comment on how these two shooters were probably "known" to authorities for reasons we have yet to be told.)

AOC recently said that “marginalized communities may have no choice but to riot” (https://thehill.com/homenews/house/455553-ocasio-cortez-says-marginalized-communities-have-no-choice-but-to-riot) and nobody in the MSM held her accountable for enthusiastically endorsing and supporting the use of violence as a political tool.  But they all point to Trump and blame him for "stoking racism".

This wave of violence was predictable.  It began a long time ago but was endorsed during Obama’s tenure when the DOJ refused to prosecute Black Panthers for shutting down a polling station.  Obama’s negative comments about the Cambridge police (who were doing their jobs when they saw someone trying to break into a home and who wouldn't produce an ID proving he lived there) pushed the “racism” narrative full-force into the mainstream.  It was the Obama DOJ that initiated a breakdown in law enforcement with its restrictions that prevented police departments from doing their jobs, especially where anyone claimed that a single bad officer meant the entire force was racist.

These two shootings were predictable.  These two shootings were probably preventable as well.  Neither of these two shootings was due to Trump, or to conservatives, or the NRA.  The only persons responsible for these two shootings were the shooters themselves.

However, instead of examining the recent restrictions on law enforcement and the warning events that led up to these shootings, Democrats will blame Trump.

Don't get me wrong: Trump isn't blameless.  His rhetoric about illegal immigrants and "shithole countries" was unfortunate and should never have been uttered by the President of the United States.

But Trump isn't responsible for hamstringing police departments and calling them racist (for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-systemic-racism-in-baltimores-police-force/2016/08/10/86ce448a-5f3f-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.27fbfc749918).  Trump isn't responsible for releasing thousands of violent criminals and illegal aliens from prisons (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ice-releases-19-723-criminal-illegals-208-convicted-of-murder-900-of-sex-crimes).

Trump isn't the problem.  He may be part of the problem.  But then, so are liberal Democrats and their public pronouncements about how evil America is, and their refusal to "look in the mirror" to see who has been pushing anti-societal policies that both justify and endorse anti-societal actions.

As the Bard of Avon wrote, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..."

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