The Raleigh shooting is still fairly fresh on everyone’s minds, and part of the reason that’s the case is that we still know so relatively little about what happened. Especially with regard to how the shooter got the firearm, much less what firearm was used.
Yet that’s not stopping Democrats.
As we know, they’re already calling for gun control.
However, that’s not all they’re doing. It seems they’re implying Republicans are to blame for the shooting.
Senate Democratic leader Dan Blue lives in the northeast Raleigh neighborhood where a shooter killed five people and injured two others outside their homes or along a nearby greenway trail.
“I’ve lived in the Hedingham community for over 30 years,” Blue said at a news conference Tuesday. “I never felt I would be unsafe in this community where we raised our kids until last week when we had a shooting that left five people dead.”
The 15-year-old suspect is hospitalized in critical condition.
“We always think, when we hear of the latest mass shooting on the news, that it can’t happen to us,” Blue said. “It can, and it did. Democrats have been calling for common sense gun safety measures for years. It’s time that these proposals finally be given serious consideration.”
…
Legislators have been unable to solve problems because issues become political, said House Democratic leader Robert Reives of Chatham County. The state needs bipartisan discussions on gun laws. “Imagine what could happen if we just sat down and talked,” he said. “Let’s take this off the table of politics and let’s be better.”
Now, of course, we know that Democrats are quick to push gun control and Republicans typically aren’t. So really, all that happened in Raleigh is the fault of pro-Second Amendment GOP lawmakers.
Seriously.
The problem with this line of “reasoning” is that we don’t know what actually happened. At least with the calls for mandatory storage laws following the Oxford High School shooting, we at least had information that the parents hadn’t secured the gun used. After Uvalde, the calls for assault weapon bans were because the killer used an AR-15.
I oppose those measures, of course, but they at least seemingly fit the context.
Here, though, we don’t have the context. All we know is that a 15-year-old kid allegedly went on a rampage, killing five people. We don’t know if the gun was typically locked up but he gained access to it. We don’t even know what kind of gun it was, officially.
We. Know. Nothing.
Because we know so little about what happened in Raleigh before the shots were fired, how can we say any measure that had been brought up would have been remotely relevant? We can’t.
That doesn’t matter to North Carolina Democrats. Not only will they use the bodies of the dead as a soapbox to push their anti-gun agenda, but they’ll also blame anyone who wasn’t on board with their efforts for what happened. It’s ghoulish and morbid.
While Halloween is less than two weeks away, this is the wrong kind of ghoulish for this particular season.
Unfortunately, the media is eating this up. They’re loving it and they’ll report it with nary a criticism for these Democrats. They like it when anti-gun lawmakers try to weaponize tragedy. They blast it from the rooftops because it’s what they want to see.
No one out there will call them out on it, only those of us on this side of the fence.
This would be fine were it not for the fact that we’re typically only preaching to gun owners who already know better.
