The lesson we’re learning from the mainstream media’s anti-gun Cindy Sheehan, Richard Martinez, is that violent crime is a problem when you are no longer personally profiting from it (our bold below):

Richard Martinez grew up around guns, shooting birds out of the fruit trees on his family’s farm. He later served as a military police officer in the U.S. Army before going on to become a criminal-defense lawyer, at times representing the young and the violent.

Now, Martinez is a grieving father.

He’s asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Chris­topher Michaels-Martinez, who was killed in the rampage Friday in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

Mr. Martinez made the personal career decision to defend violent criminals as part of his legal practice. It was something that paid the bills for at least part of his legal career. Unfortunately, a man like those he once defended has visited violence upon his only son, taking his life.

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child to such senseless violence. It is not something that I would wish upon anyone.

While the other parents of those stabbed, shot, or run over by the deranged narcissist in the Isla Vista rampage have been introspective in their grief, Martinez instead ran to the media’s cameras to lash out against, of all things, gun owners who have done him no harm. The media, of course, have more than happy to use him as a convenient prop since that time, and they will continue to do so until he becomes either embarrassing or irrelevant. We’ve seen it all before.

I don’t personally believe in the concept of karma—far too many bad things happen to good people—but I’m forced to wonder if Mr. Martinez does. Is his newfound crusade to destroy the constitutional rights of more than 300 million Americans the result of guilt he is harboring for building his personal fortune on representing the sort of violent sociopaths that murdered his son? Yes, I’m aware it is a “cruel” question to ask, but despite what a now insignificant Maureen Dowd once claimed, having your child killed does not grant anyone “absolute moral authority.”

Grief does not magically grant wisdom to the sufferer, and those who embrace and revel in suffering instead of finding a way to work through it often tend to have their worldviews skewed in bizarre, irrational ways.

Cindy Sheehan’s warped mind thought that sitting on a ditch bank in Crawford Texas and blaming Jews for the Iraq War was the correct way to remember her brave son, who died in combat after volunteering for a rescue mission. Richard Martinez’s grieving and twisted mind somehow thinks that imposing the same hyper-rigid and ineffective gun control laws that failed to protect his son upon the rest of the United States is going to save lives. It’s a bizarre belief, when background checks, gun registration, waiting periods, magazine limits and other California gun control laws were no impediment at all to the rage-filled young man who murdered his soon and five others with a plethora of weapons that included a machete, a hammer, a car, and handguns.

Richard Martinez is certainly angry. He’s obviously hurting. He’s certainly full of blame.

It’s too bad that he is directing his ire at those who have done him no harm.