Friday, June 16, 2017

The Alexandria Shooting and the Left

It is very disheartening to see the reactions from the left to the attempt by a gunman to kill several members of Congress during a baseball practice. The Left has been involved in ever-escalating acts of violence but none of the reactions admit this. Instead they blame everyone but themselves. Here are some of the alleged excuses.

Guns. Yes, the attacker used guns. But would he have simply given up and stayed in Illinois if he hadn't had access to guns? While he had a violent past he had never done anything that would have triggered any of the "common sense gun laws" we keep hearing about. There are at least 9 million "assault rifles" in America but they kill fewer people than knives. Regardless, I'm seeing people quoting statistics for all gun deaths, including suicides (which is always included to triple the body count).

Even without guns, the attacker still wanted to kill Republicans. He could have driven his van into people just as terrorists in Europe have been doing.

Republicans. They were against gun legislation so "the reaped what thew sowed". Seriously, a friend said that on Facebook. He later denied that he was victim-blaming which means he doesn't understand the term. Regardless, the idea here is that, because Republicans didn't support legislation that would not have stopped this attack, they deserved to be targeted.

Scalise. He was a bad person and deserved it. This is because he once gave a speech at an event organized by a group associated with David Duke (Scalise has since apologized for it). The shooter was not trying to assassinate Scalise. He was shooting at Republicans in general. Four people were shot and two others injured trying to get out of the way. Plus there were children present.

Trump. Because everything bad is Trump's fault. Two clips from the campaign are taken out of context to "prove" that Trump inspired a new level of violence in the country. Context is missing. The two clips were in response to protestors trying to disrupt Trump Rallies. There are general excuses that Trump caused violence to increase because he a racist, etc.

What they ignore. While it's possible to point to a few isolated examples of violent rhetoric from the Right, the Left has been engaging in it for years. The Democrats embraced Black Lives Matters even as they called for "more dead cops". Antifa protestors have trashed cities regularly in the name of resisting Trump. Conservative speakers have been run off of campus through the threat of violence and occasionally through actual violence.

Hillary Clinton is part of The Resistance (a name inspired by the anti-Nazi French Underground in WWII). She has also claimed that the Russians cost her the elections. Numerous Democrats have gone further, claiming that Trump colluded with the Russians. Former MSNBC-host Keith Olbermann claims that we have had a bloodless coup and has called on foreign powers to step in and save us from Trump. Democratic members of Congress have suggested that they should have waited to confirm Trump's Supreme Court nominee until the investigation into Russia was complete (which could take years). Every law and executive order that Trump signs is put in the worst possible light.

Given this backdrop, it's no wonder that someone from the far left with a tendency to violence would decide to take matters into his own hands.

But it would take a major piece of introspection for the Left to recognize how violent and unhinged it has become. It would also be self-defeating. Advocacy groups are raking in cash by whipng up anti-Trump hysteria.

Note: one thing missing from the blame-Trump argument is the "Trump Effect', a wave of Trump-inspired violence against women and minorities that swept the nation. I think this was a deliberate omission. The Trump Effect never happened. All of the highly-publicized events were false reports. Either nothing happened at all or someone on the left committed a hate crime so the the Right would be blamed. No one on the Left wants this inconvenient fact brought up so they stayed silent about it.


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