It quickly got buried in the hectic news cycle surrounding the Christmas holiday season, but it shouldn't have. The White House deserves public denunciation and censure for the shameful statement they produced following the tragic school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin two weeks ago.
Under the name of dementia-addled President Joe Biden, whoever is currently running the country put out a despicable series of legislative demands just moments after the body bags were removed from Abundant Life School. On the official letterhead of our country's chief executive were listed the same four, standard, stale demands of the Democrat Party gun grabbers for years: universal background checks, a national red flag law, a ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines.
I describe those demands as "despicable" not because I disagree with the legislative wish list in principle, but because none of those things have anything to do with the crime that was just committed. After a horrific crime, the statement had nothing to do with saving children's lives. It had nothing to do with honoring the substitute teacher and 14-year-old girl who lay dead because of the shooter's rage. It had nothing to do with comforting the grieving families.
It's as though the person who authored the statement, and the Democrat brain trust that edited, approved, and published it, didn't even bother to look into what had actually just happened in that school. They just wanted money and saw a great chance to control a hospitable news media and get it. The statement was political gamesmanship being leveraged on the bodies of two innocent victims. Despicable.
To be clear…
Universal background checks would have done nothing to stop what happened in Madison. It's already illegal to sell a firearm to a 15-year-old under federal law. No background check was needed to know she shouldn't have a gun.
A national red flag law would have done nothing to stop what happened in Madison. You can confiscate guns from someone who is already legally barred from having them.
A ban on assault weapons would have done nothing to stop what happened in Madison. The crime was committed with a handgun, as are 95% of all gun homicides in America.
A ban on high-capacity magazines would have done nothing to stop what happened in Madison. This killer used a standard-capacity magazine.
Joe Biden didn't write this statement any more than he wrote any other statement he's issued over the last four years. But someone who is actually running the country right now, someone who currently leads the Democrat Party as the puppet master did. And they deserve to be exposed and shamed for using the pain and sorrow of two families, and the trauma of a school full of children, to angle for more power and money.
But they won't be, because that's what we've been conditioned to expect and accept. Since the Columbine massacre, it seems like we've all become trained to put on our team's uniform and trudge out into the battlefields of the public square - protests, town halls, or social media - and fight the other team to an inevitable draw. We assume the worst of one another, 2nd Amendment purists accusing gun control activists of facilitating a coming government tyranny, gun control activists accusing 2nd Amendment purists of elevating their gun fetish over the lives of children.
Radical anti-gun groups like Moms Demand make serious bank mocking the "thoughts and prayers" crowd. The NRA does pretty well for itself too, seeing bumps in fundraising from those who correctly anticipate a sudden surge in legislative efforts to restrict gun rights.
And besides the interest groups, politicians of every level - federal, state, local - quickly mobilize to raise money themselves, either cutting ads and sending out fundraising emails to "defend the 2nd Amendment," or to "say enough is enough, we must end gun violence now." I read two such emails over the Christmas holiday in the aftermath of the Abundant Life shooting this last week.
It would be nice if at least one time after a school shooting everyone would quit pretending there are any easy answers or solutions to a problem that we all want fixed, and instead agreed to concentrate on the one thing that could be done: fortify schools. Why aren't we protecting children in government facilities we call schools (yes, I know Abundant Life was different as a private school) the same way we protect judges, clerks, and prosecutors in government facilities we call courthouses?
If I have to pass through a metal detector manned by three trained officers in order to report for jury duty, why don't I have to do the same to report to homeroom? If the Abundant Life killer had been required to do so, she wouldn't have had a gun in study hall, and two people wouldn't be dead. But instead of demanding things that could help, we'd rather bicker about theoretical reasons for the violence and fundraise.
At some point, maybe that should change?
