RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lately, the left has been spouting about unchallenged moral authority. Rep. Scalise is the closest thing to a sitting official with unchallenged moral authority on mass shootings. He was seriously wounded when a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire at practice for a congressional charity baseball game. Instead of seizing on that, Rep. Scalise and other Republicans took the high ground.

Meanwhile after Parkland, the left went right back to its swamp.

I don’t expect the media or the left to listen to Rep. Scalise. But maybe this should be a reminder that decency doesn’t work with the indecent. Republicans should have treated the attack just like Parkland.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said Monday that lawmakers should be focused on addressing mental health to help stop future shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14 and the one last summer in which he was shot, before they focus on ways to take people’s guns away.

“Let’s focus more on addressing these problems in mental health that we’ve started to deal with in Congress,” Scalise said on Fox News. “Let’s close loopholes, let’s figure out what went wrong with government before people start talking about taking away the rights of law abiding citizens.”

That would be the right thing to do. There’s majority support for it. But the left is obsessed with dismantling the Bill of Rights instead.

The reactions to the Florida school shooting have been so predictable that most commentary starts with some variation of “here we go again.” The usual “solutions” to the problem are trotted out, each with its varying degrees of weakness, and none able to achieve what everybody expects––no more massacres of kids at school. But more interesting than this fossilized debate are the unspoken assumptions behind the various recommendations, and our culture’s inability to talk meaningfully about the most consequential phenomenon in history: human evil. That’s why it’s easier to ritually repeat the same failed decades-old “solutions,” or to politicize the bloodshed for partisan gain.

The left, of course, thinks “smarter” gun control is the answer. They want to ban “assault rifles,” a scare-term that confuses semiautomatic with automatic weapons, the sale of which is already strictly limited. Then they sell the bait-and-switch by highlighting sinister-looking add-ons like silencers or high-capacity magazines. But if anti-gun nuts were concerned with gun deaths rather than the relatively rare but more politically fungible multiple-victim school-shootings, they’d know that very few murders involve rifles. In 2016, murderers were 19 times more likely to use handguns than rifles. And more murders were committed with hands and feet than with rifles. Demonizers of “assault rifles” forget that they were banned from 1994 to 2004, and that the ban was ineffective, failing to stop the Columbine shooters in 1999, or even to reduce firearm killings.

Other talking points are equally useless for anything other than partisan gain. Like the “assault rifle,” the NRA has become the bogeyman Dems reflexively trot out for a two-minute hate after every high-profile shooting. Politicians who gobble up billions of dollars from public employee unions and tech plutocrats condemn the comparative pittance the NRA spends in lobbying to defend a Constitutional right. Confiscation of guns, along the lines of Australia’s program a few years back, runs afoul of the Second Amendment, not to mention being practically impossible given that there are about 300 million guns in circulation, five million of which are the dreaded AR-15 “assault rifles.”

Former president Obama actually said the following at his secret MIT speech, according to the transcript obtained by Reason magazine: “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us. I know that seems like a low bar.”

It seems as though Obama set a tremendously high bar as to what would embarrass him.

It should have been embarrassing to Obama and his supporters when:

He continually lied by saying you could keep your doctor and your health plan and that premiums would go down when Obamacare passed.

He had a gun-running operation called Fast and Furious, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of over 2,000 guns it allowed to be sold to Mexican drug cartels and people died. Obama claimed he had no idea about the project but claimed executive privilege to hide documents.

His IRS targeted political opponents, violating their free speech and freedom of association rights granted by the Constitution.

He sicced his Justice Department goons on the Little Sisters of the Poor, suing them for daring to believe they had religious freedom.

Planned Parenthood personnel were caught bragging that they crunched and crushed babies for profit. Somehow, Obama, the media, and other Democrats didn’t have any empathy for the babies and weren’t embarrassed at all about this appalling practice. Nor did they do anything to hold Planned Parenthood accountable, ignoring the law.

He left people to die in Libya while he and Hillary concocted a lie to protect their political power. He even lied to the families of those who died and had Susan Rice continually lie to the public, showing that he and Hillary have zero empathy for those who died and their families. His minions arrested and imprisoned a man they knowingly falsely blamed for an anti-Mohammed video. And people say Trump has no empathy and doesn’t discharge his duties as president.