Obama: Never Letting A Good Mass Shooting Go To Waste
By Matthew Vadum
Mere hours after a young, mixed-race religion-hater fatally shot at least nine apparently Christian victims at an Oregon college, President Obama tried to harangue Americans into supporting fresh restrictions on guns, the most severely regulated consumer goods in America.
The shooter has been identified as 20-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer. Police say in mid-morning they received reports of a gunman walking around Umpqua Community College (UCC) near Roseburg, Ore. As is the case in all or perhaps nearly all mass shootings at schools, UCC was a gun-free zone.
Wearing body armor, the man reportedly entered a classroom where an English and writing class was being conducted and demanded that those present state their religion.
Those who indicated they were Christian were fatally shot. Those who refused to answer were reportedly shot in the legs. Harper-Mercer apparently died during a shootout with responding police but at time of writing it was unclear if he killed himself or was shot by the officers.
Viewing every crisis as an opportunity to advance his legislative agenda, Obama placed his crosshairs squarely on the Bill of Rights. Our media-savvy, Saul Alinsky-worshipping president took to the bully pulpit to petulantly insist -- even before many facts about the massacre were known -- that last night was exactly the right time to "politicize" gun ownership rights.
“This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America,” Obama said. “We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”
In his televised temper tantrum, Obama scolded those opposed to a crackdown on firearms ownership, including people who say the nation needs "more guns" to prevent such mass shootings. He implored those who would gut Second Amendment protections to vote for political candidates who share their visceral contempt for a constitutionally-guaranteed right.
“Each time this happens I’m going to bring this up,” Obama said. “Each time this happens I am going to say we can actually do something about it.”
Obama's twelve-and-a-half minute oration was the fifteenth time the president has issued a statement on a mass shooting, CBS Radio reporter Mark Knoller wrote on Twitter.
“Somehow this has become routine,” Obama said. “The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine. And what becomes routine is the response from those who oppose any sort of gun control legislation."
Indeed Obama's shopworn routine has become all too familiar to Americans. Whenever there is a mass shooting Obama predictably uses it to try to disarm law-abiding gun owners.
Obama refuses to accept that the primary purpose of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has always been to check governmental power. It was designed to empower citizens to fight back against the kind of despotism that Obama has increasingly come to represent.
Tench Coxe (1755-1824), a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress and a key ally of James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, explained the rationale behind the Second Amendment pseudonymously in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette on June 18, 1789:
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear private arms.
As Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News Channel after a previous Obama gun-control push:
We have a 200-year history and culture of gun ownership. And we have a Second Amendment and we have a system that believes that the rights, the Second Amendment, in other words, predate the republic and the point of having a government, as in the Declaration [of Independence], is to secure the rights. In Britain you have no such right, the government will control gun ownership so unless you're willing to confiscate, which would be unconstitutional and that would cause an insurrection in the country -- Australia did -- these things are not going to have an effect, except at the margins and that's the tragedy here.
But none of this matters to our president whose disdain for gun ownership rights is unparalleled in the modern era. There are never enough restrictions on firearms to satisfy Obama.
As author David B. Kopel has said, guns are already "the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale."
Obama used the rest of his address to regurgitate once again the Left's usual, hysterical anti-gun propaganda.
He said:
We don't yet know why this individual did what he did. And it's fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be. But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.
Earlier this year, I answered a question in an interview by saying, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws -- even in the face of repeated mass killings.” And later that day, there was a mass shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. That day!
He added, "We've become numb to this."
"We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don't work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence."
This cherry-picking Chief Executive's statement is at best a half-truth or misleading, or at worst, a lie. The issue is not how many "gun deaths" there are. The issue is how many deaths there are that were a result of murder.
As Newsmax previously reported, some of the states with tough gun laws have lower-than-average homicide rates. Some have higher-than-average homicide rates.
The news website took the seven states that both Guns & Ammo magazine and the gun-grabbing Brady Campaign consider to have the most stringent gun laws. The Brady bunch characterized those states as having the "strongest gun laws," while the pro-gun magazine called them the "worst states for gun owners."
Cross-referencing those select states with data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 2011, yields interesting results. According to the federal agency the national, or average, rate of "murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" is 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Maryland, a state whose constitution, Guns & Ammo notes, "does not guarantee a right to keep and bear arms," has a murder rate of 6.8 per 100,000 people. California's rate is 4.8 murders.
Slightly below the national average is New Jersey at 4.3 murders.
Farther below the 4.7 average rate are New York (4.0), followed by Connecticut (3.6),
Massachusetts (2.8), and Hawaii (1.2).
Incidentally, the District of Columbia, which even after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in the celebrated Heller case, still has near-draconian gun laws designed to make it very difficult to own or carry a gun, has an appalling murder rate of 17.5 per 100,000 inhabitants.
So the veracity of Obama's claim that "states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths" is hardly self-evident -- and again, even if he's right, the overall homicide rate, not "gun deaths," is what is actually important.
Nor is Obama's mass-shootings fetish meaningful.
According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), all the hubbub about mass-shootings is nonsense:
No other type of homicide generates such public fear or stupefaction at its meaninglessness as that involving multiple victims. Due to its often shocking and sensational nature, particularly of so-called “rampage killings”, mass murder also captures the attention of the public, the media and policymakers the world over, which no doubt colours perceptions of the prevalence and patterns of such events. [...]
Mass homicides may have a high profile, but they are actually low-frequency events, accounting, for example, for less than 1 per cent of all homicide cases in the United States and less than 3 per cent in Finland and Sweden.
And contrary to media-promoted myth, the United States doesn't even have a high murder rate compared to other countries.
According to the UNODC, the global average murder rate is 6.2 per 100,000 human beings. The UN agency defines intentional homicide as "unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person."
The U.S. (excluding Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands which are reported on individually) is near the middle of 228 countries profiled.
With 4.7 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the United States ties at 110th place with Latvia and Niger.
Number one is Honduras with a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. At the very bottom of the list are Liechtenstein and Monaco which reported zero murders in the time period studied. (Note: The UK Daily Mail offers a user-friendly interactive map breaking down homicide rates around the world.)
Facts, of course, are malleable playthings for Obama and the Left.
It was just three years ago after 17-year-old thug Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in self-defense, that Obama race-baited by throwing out the red herring that "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
Harper-Mercer has quite a lot in common with Obama. They're both angry, hate-filled mixed-race men with warm feelings for terrorists.
According to news reports, the Oregon shooter was half-white and half-black. His MySpace page contains Irish Republican Army (IRA) propaganda and he reportedly purchased Nazi paraphernalia online. One of his only two friends listed posted pro-Islamist propaganda on his personal page.
Harper-Mercer also reportedly praised Vester Lee Flanagan II, a failed, black, gay TV reporter and Black Lives Matter supporter who shot two of his white former colleagues to death on live television in August.
The Oregon shooter wrote:
I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more your're [sic] in the limelight.
Barack Obama never praised Flanagan, but if the president had a son, in many ways he'd look a lot like mass-murderer Chris Harper-Mercer.
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