The Shameful Left And Revisionism

It took only a few hours for the radical left to literally infest the entire Huffington Post with what amount to a litany of lies.

I don't believe this tragedy should be reduced to a debate over the disturbed shooter's motives.

Of course they should be. A man can commit a horrific amount of murder with a car or a gallon of gasoline.

"What is clear to me, at this chaotic moment, is that no one should be surprised by this turn of events. The bullets that were fired in Tucson this morning are the logical extension of every bit of partisan hatred that came spewing out during the last election, in which Gabrielle Giffords---a centrist, representing well and faithfully a centrist district---was vilified and demonized as a socialist, a communist, a fascist, a job-killer, a traitor, and more.

Anyone who uttered such words or paid for them to be uttered has his or her name etched on those bullets.

You mean like all the leftists who instantly tried to claim this was somehow "Tea Party" or "Right" related?

Candidates are "targeted". An opponent is "in the crosshairs". Liberals have to be "eliminated". Opponents are "enemies". This kind of language eminates largely from those who claim to defend American democracy against those who would destroy it, who are evil, and who want to "take away our freedoms".

Oh, and it's just those e-vile Republicans doing it, right? Ever read Daily Kos? They email me daily with their updates - and their rhetoric is just as vile and outrageous. If you wish to argue for more reason in our political discourse, you might start with your own side of the aisle.

As for "tolerating" such things, there's a long line of rhetoric about people being thrown down the stairs and similar things - from the left. During Bush's second election campaign there was an advertisement circulating on The Internet depicting him literally pushing a stick-figure granny down the stairs.

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

As a consequence I find it rather disturbing, to put it mildly, that The Left has suddenly grown a conscience - for others. Of course they are silent as regards their own sins......

Politics has always been a nasty sport; "Daisy" anyone? What's worse than insinuating that your opponent will literally lead the nation to be vaporized in a nuclear holocaust if he's elected? May I remind everyone that in point of fact this sort of rhetoric is nothing new, and in fact is about as old as politics itself - there were all sorts of "leaflet wars" in the early years of our nation with various scurrilous and outrageous charges leveled by people nailing flyers (anonymously at that) up on poles and similar.

We have a First Amendment for a reason. It protects the offensive speech of both the left and right.

While we are all still learning details about this shooting, and particularly the 22-year old responsible for this horrendous act, we should find it unacceptable that when Americans and our elected leaders are assembling in public places, their lives are at risk from gun violence.

As opposed to their lives being at risk from 2-ton projectiles that we all operate every day without a second thought, each of which carries a hundred times the kinetic energy (that is, the potential to do harm) when in motion at a mere 20mph of a common handgun bullet? The idiocy expressed by some people never ceases to amaze, and The Brady Bunch are among the worst. Never mind their remedy - disarming the common man.

There's only one tiny problem - we can't manage to (thanks to the Left) keep people from coming across our southern border and it's the Left that sets up these wonderful "sanctuary cities" and in fact sues to prevent States from enforcing laws bearing on same. I'm sure these same commentators will explain how a wide-open border over which gang members flow with impunity will also not provide criminals with as many guns as they want. Their "solution" disarms only the law-abiding citizen, leaving the nuts and crooks with access to all the firearms they'd like to have, with disastrous results.

And let's not forget that while Judge Roll, a young girl and others who had no connection with political anything were murdered (the former an offense that carries the death penalty and the latter ones that damn well should) and Congressswoman Giffords was seriously wounded (along with a number of others) it isn't like murder is an uncommon thing. There literally isn't a day that goes by in which we don't hear of someone getting killed. Hell, in most large cities "a murder a day" is pretty much par for the course, and some manage to bang out two or more.

But what we don't hear about is all the times that firearms in the hands of civilians stop felonies - most of the time (98%, in fact) without a shot being fired. There are no accurate numbers as many of these incidents don't generate a police report but there is good evidence that firearms owned by civilians are used to stop more than twice as many crimes as they are used to commit - that is, over 1 million times a year someone stops a felony with a civilian-owned firearm, and almost never has to actually discharge it. Fewer than 1% of all firearms in The United States are ever used in a crime and there are more than 20,000 "gun control" laws at the federal, state and local levels.

Further, the number of mistaken killings by civilians is one tenth that of police - who kill, on accident, about one innocent person a day with their service weapons. This is true despite the fact that there are about 800,000 law enforcement officers of all sorts in The United States and 330,000,000 people.

At 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 5, the Framingham Police SWAT Team served a search warrant at 26 Fountain St. in Framingham. During the service of the search warrant Mr. Eurie Stamps was tragically and fatally struck by a bullet which was discharged from a SWAT officer’s rifle. Despite immediate intervention by tactical medics, he died at the scene.

Mr. Stamps wasn't the subject of the warrant and he wasn't armed. I'll bet my last dollar that the cop who shot him won't be charged with capital murder or even 1st degree manslaughter, even though this is quite-clearly homicide. Not only was Mr. Stamps unarmed, he's a 68-year old grandfather of 12 and there were no weapons found in the house.

Anyone remember the shooting in Detroit where the cops shot and killed a young girl asleep on the couch?

These aren't isolated incidents - in point of fact they happen about once a day.

That is, statistically speaking, you are forty thousand times more likely to be mistakenly shot by a police officer than an ordinary citizen.

Such rhetoric turns lethal in a nation where anyone with a grudge and a credit card can outfit himself with the most lethal firearms for sale on the civilian market in the world.

Oh really? The very same model of 9mm semi-automatic pistol which the gunman is reported to have been armed with, was discarded by a number of police departments because it wasn't lethal enough. After a massive shoot-out with drug-dealers in Miami there were real questions about the "stopping power" of these rounds, and many law enforcement agencies have gone to a more powerful cartridge. Maybe it's a good thing that he used this weapon instead of something with even more firepower - the Congresswoman may in fact be alive today as a direct consequence of the armament the assailant decided to use.

Josh goes on to rant about large-capacity magazines - which of course has nothing to do with anything. A gunman or woman can easily carry more than one magazine, and changes are a half-second proposition for someone with training and/or knowledge - which this individual clearly had, as reports from the scene are that he was highly-measured and "in control" as he shot the people there.

Members of Congress are now the latest victims held hostage by America's gun culture. Congress should act immediately to reinstate an effective ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines and move quickly to pass an effective assault weapons ban.

"Assault weapons" (automatic-fire weapons) were not used in this assault and in fact almost-never are. Select-fire weapons (machine guns), which are what an "assault weapon" is, are only legal in private possession with personal and explicit BATFE license and are both quite rare and damn expensive. While they're not unheard of in criminal cases (there have been a couple - like literally a couple), they weren't used in this case. The so-called "assault weapons" that Josh speaks of look scary (e.g. an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle) and yet are in fact not lethal enough to be legal to hunt deer with in many jurisdictions as they do not provide a humane taking of the game.

That is, for those who failed High School English on the left, they're less lethal than a common deer rifle that is not considered an "assault weapon." Laws based on fear are bad laws, and those who peddle fear should not be debating serious issue in public - especially not when they're exploiting someone's murder for rank political purpose.

What joins all these people together is the often-repeated and tired claim that we can all have safety if we'll give up liberty.

In fact, they have extremely-strict laws on firearms ownership, some of the most-restrictive in the world. It is somewhat of a matter of "national pride." It is essentially impossible for a citizen to own anything more powerful than a .22. Further, you must register every weapon and you can only buy ammunition if you have a license for a weapon of that caliber. You must document need for any sort of defensive weapon other than a shotgun or .22, and carry permits are almost impossible to obtain, along with pistols in the general sense.

Those laws haven't done a damn thing to stop the Mexican drug gangs from getting guns or shooting people with them, as we all know. But what it has done is turn law-abiding Mexican citizens into targets in a shooting gallery, and thousands of them have died - fifteen thousand in the last year alone. Given that Mexico has about 107 million people, or about a third of the population of The United States, you are about as likely to die in Mexico by being shot as you are in a car wreck in The United States on a per-capita per-year basis, and are more than three times as likely to be shot there than here - despite Mexico's far-stricter gun laws.

We, in The United States, ever happy to do our part in providing illegal firearms to criminals but subsidizing none for civilian self-defense, have discovered that banks are funneling drug money to the criminals and yet we refuse to prosecute the responsible parties and close those institutions - they're "too big to jail."

This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.

Should we try to react to this with more shrill "gun control" rhetoric all we're going to do is turn the American people into targets - just like Mexico has.

What we should do instead is mandate legal open and concealed carry everywhere for everyone - at least this way when some nut decides to try to unload on a crowd peacefully debating political matters on a street-corner (you know, like we're supposed to do in The United States?) the intended victims have something to defend themselves with!

Yesterday's news coverage was interesting. I scanned the channels and listened to at least a bit of all of them. There was only one station that was not trying to spin this as a "radical Tea Party type" assault - Fox News! Amazingly enough they didn't try to pin it on the left either - they instead went out of their way to not do that, and to paint what, at this point, looks like a fairly-accurate picture - a guy who was disturbed at best, psychotic at worst, and had no known or reasonably-presumed connection to anything political - from either side. You sure didn't get that from any of the other "major media" outlets, and the left's blogoshere, as I document above, was full of wildly-inaccurate lies - none of which, I'm sure, they'll apologize for and retract in the days to come.

Finally, we have now-known (or at least available and claimed) facts on the alleged gunman.

Despite The Left's attempt to scrub the data, the facts are that this individual appears to have been a radical....... leftist. Not that I particularly like that site's attempted painting either - the person who they allegedly claimed was "maybe" involved over on Daily Kos appears to not have been (he claimed to have tried to kill himself by shooting himself in the mouth but failed to die, and there's nothing in the media suggesting that the suspect was missing half his face.)

That's right. He was quite-clearly not a Tea Party type, but more of a..... Communist? Maybe. His Youtube profile listed Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto as favorite books. The videos posted there were incoherent rants on alleged abuses of grammar and language - one could wonder if he was referring to President Clinton and his attempted redefinition of "is", but there wasn't enough mental focus there to know. The videos are laced with allegations that the government is engaged in "mind control" (although he never explains exactly what he's talking about in that regard.)

It gets better - he seemed to believe that the entirety of NASA's manned space program was a fraud. You know - we never really set foot on the moon (multiple times), we never really put men in space on the Shuttle, McAuliffe and crew didn't really die when Challenger blew up, the ISS doesn't exist, etc. Maybe that's the motive - the Congresswoman's husband is an astronaut.

It would appear that the suspect is a bit delusional, I think. Add some paranoia to that and you got a bad - maybe lethal - combination.

Do we need to look further than that? Probably not when it comes to motive, but we do when it comes to law enforcement failures.

See, there are also, unfortunately, reports in the media that the suspect had expressed homicidal ideation - that is, a desire (or threat) to murder. That's in the press at this point, and it's a problem. If this was known to the local law enforcement community, why wasn't he evaluated with regard to his mental stability? That may explain why the Pima County Sheriff was talking trash yesterday - he knows he's got himself a bit of 'splaining to do once people figure out that they had this guy in custody at least once, knew he was potentially unstable and that he was a threat to others. If they had done their job perhaps this wouldn't have happened - you see, it is already illegal for someone who is mentally ill to purchase and/or own a firearm, which begs the question: did every opportunity exist to interdict this individual at some point in the last couple of years, including direct contact with law enforcement who were aware of homicidal threats and his behavior at his college, and yet either the procedures were not in place to refer him for evaluation or they were not followed?

We don't know - yet - but what's clear from his Youtube videos is that there's a complete lack of what would be thought of as "reason" among most of us.

Finally, the alleged shooter exposed what he thought of our government, our nation, and our laws through the video he "favorited" - and there was only one.

It depicted a hooded man (who appears to only have one arm), set to the song "Let The Bodies Hit The Floor", approaching and setting on fire a tattered American flag.

Irrational? Looks like it. Psychotic? Maybe. Schitzophrenic? Possibly. Bi-polar and unmedicated (except by self-medicating with pot, which he allegedly like to smoke)? Decent bet there. We'll find out, I suspect, as his mental status will obviously factor large in the upcoming trial.

Thanks for posting this article. At the risk of being hauled up by DHS, I’d say we have a fight on our hands and this is no time to be backing away.

I’m a Conservative, a Christian and I live in America. No one is going to keep me from airing my views and standing for my beliefs.

Rush was right again, when he said after the elections, that the libs were going
to be even more hateful and dangerous because of the defeat at the ballot box.

We’re seeing it even more now... they are truly evil beings.

Your welcome if we don’t speak up and get the record set straight the mainstream news sure isn’t going to do it.

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