Brazile’s Rant And More Tragic Gunfire
November 11, 2017 at 5:34 a.m.
By Gary [email protected]
Brazile pretty much throws Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee under the bus. She labels them a cult and falls just short of accusing them of money laundering.
Obviously, I don’t know Donna Brazile, but each time I’ve seen her, she seemed quite the party loyalist. Not that she was beyond reproach or anything.
I mean, after all, even though she was feeling like a “slave,” and a “whipping girl,” while enduring “titan egos,” and a “party in crisis,” she still had the wherewithal to feed Hillary advance copies of debate questions. Those, of course, were questions to be asked of Hillary and her opponent, Bernie Sanders.
This is weird to me. One of the complaints in Brazile’s book was that Hillary and the party rigged the election against Bernie. Well, if she thought that was the case, why didn’t she slip Bernie the debate questions?
Brazile’s rant certainly is fairly entertaining.
But it leaves me with one big questions: What, precisely, did the Clintons do to set Donna Brazile off?
For a longtime, loyal party operative to go that far off the rails, it must have been pretty, pretty bothersome.
*****
Yet another tragic mass shooting has gripped the nation and reignited the debate about what to do about such things.
This one was unique in several ways, but the thing that really stood out for me was how acquaintances of the shooter described him.
In past heinous crimes like this, the shooter’s friends, relatives and neighbors almost universally act surprised.
They say things like, “He was quiet,” or “He kept to himself” or “I never would have imagined he could do such a thing.”
Not this time.
This time his acquaintances were saying quite the opposite. They all knew the guy was unhinged.
And what makes the tragedy even worse is that so did the government.
There were at least three triggering events that should have planted the shooter firmly on the government’s radar. Domestic violence, death threats and the equivalent of a felony conviction.
For whatever reason, none of those events made it into the National Instant Criminal Background Indexes, or NICS. So the shooter simply walked into a gunshop and lied on the federal form. The gunshop employee called in the NICS check and it came back with a big, happy “proceed.”
Clearly, the guy should have been in the system and should have been denied the ability to buy a gun. Perhaps he could have procured a gun in some other way, but there’s no way he should have been able to pass a NICS?check.
So here we have a case were there are laws in place to prohibit a guy like this getting a gun and the laws failed miserably. The government had a solid chance to protect its citizens and blew it.
If only we had a law that said domestic abusers couldn’t get guns. Oh wait. We did.
If only we had a law that said felons couldn’t get guns. Oh wait. We did.
The fact that the laws didn’t work isn’t necessarily shocking, but it drives home a significant point with regard to the debate over gun control.
The shooter was a criminal. He had absolutely no regard for the law. It wouldn’t have mattered what law stood in the way of his sick, depraved plan, he would have broken it, if he could get away with it.
Does anyone suppose he had any remorse over lying on a federal firearms form in a gunshop?
The converse of that argument also is true. Law-abiding citizens are just that – law abiding. If for example, there had been a law barring the citizen who fired his rifle at the shooter from owning that rifle, he would have dutifully complied. The law-abiding citizen would have been unarmed.
At that point, the only thing between the lunatic and more hapless victims would have been the cops, who were miles away.
I know that many anti-gun-control arguments may sound trite or contrived.
“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Or, “When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.”
But the logic in those statements is irrefutable.
The pro-gun-control crowd favors laws that failed to stop this maniac, and disarming law-abiding citizen who did stop him.
That makes no sense to me.
I’m sure there now will be calls to ban this weapon or that weapon. Frankly, the government can ban whatever it wants, but it’s not going to deter someone bent on mass murder.
To me, the larger question is why we have so many people in the U.S. who are so inclined.
Pro-gun-control people always like to say that other countries don’t have mass shootings like the U.S. does, and that’s true.
But here’s my question: Is that because people in other countries can’t get their hands on guns? Or is it because they simply lack the desire to kill mass numbers of people?
I think it’s the latter.
And until we figure out what drives people to behave that way, we will have mass casualty events.
Whether it’s a gun, or a pressure cooker bomb or a moving truck, psychotic people bent on mass murder will find a way.
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Brazile pretty much throws Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee under the bus. She labels them a cult and falls just short of accusing them of money laundering.
Obviously, I don’t know Donna Brazile, but each time I’ve seen her, she seemed quite the party loyalist. Not that she was beyond reproach or anything.
I mean, after all, even though she was feeling like a “slave,” and a “whipping girl,” while enduring “titan egos,” and a “party in crisis,” she still had the wherewithal to feed Hillary advance copies of debate questions. Those, of course, were questions to be asked of Hillary and her opponent, Bernie Sanders.
This is weird to me. One of the complaints in Brazile’s book was that Hillary and the party rigged the election against Bernie. Well, if she thought that was the case, why didn’t she slip Bernie the debate questions?
Brazile’s rant certainly is fairly entertaining.
But it leaves me with one big questions: What, precisely, did the Clintons do to set Donna Brazile off?
For a longtime, loyal party operative to go that far off the rails, it must have been pretty, pretty bothersome.
*****
Yet another tragic mass shooting has gripped the nation and reignited the debate about what to do about such things.
This one was unique in several ways, but the thing that really stood out for me was how acquaintances of the shooter described him.
In past heinous crimes like this, the shooter’s friends, relatives and neighbors almost universally act surprised.
They say things like, “He was quiet,” or “He kept to himself” or “I never would have imagined he could do such a thing.”
Not this time.
This time his acquaintances were saying quite the opposite. They all knew the guy was unhinged.
And what makes the tragedy even worse is that so did the government.
There were at least three triggering events that should have planted the shooter firmly on the government’s radar. Domestic violence, death threats and the equivalent of a felony conviction.
For whatever reason, none of those events made it into the National Instant Criminal Background Indexes, or NICS. So the shooter simply walked into a gunshop and lied on the federal form. The gunshop employee called in the NICS check and it came back with a big, happy “proceed.”
Clearly, the guy should have been in the system and should have been denied the ability to buy a gun. Perhaps he could have procured a gun in some other way, but there’s no way he should have been able to pass a NICS?check.
So here we have a case were there are laws in place to prohibit a guy like this getting a gun and the laws failed miserably. The government had a solid chance to protect its citizens and blew it.
If only we had a law that said domestic abusers couldn’t get guns. Oh wait. We did.
If only we had a law that said felons couldn’t get guns. Oh wait. We did.
The fact that the laws didn’t work isn’t necessarily shocking, but it drives home a significant point with regard to the debate over gun control.
The shooter was a criminal. He had absolutely no regard for the law. It wouldn’t have mattered what law stood in the way of his sick, depraved plan, he would have broken it, if he could get away with it.
Does anyone suppose he had any remorse over lying on a federal firearms form in a gunshop?
The converse of that argument also is true. Law-abiding citizens are just that – law abiding. If for example, there had been a law barring the citizen who fired his rifle at the shooter from owning that rifle, he would have dutifully complied. The law-abiding citizen would have been unarmed.
At that point, the only thing between the lunatic and more hapless victims would have been the cops, who were miles away.
I know that many anti-gun-control arguments may sound trite or contrived.
“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Or, “When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.”
But the logic in those statements is irrefutable.
The pro-gun-control crowd favors laws that failed to stop this maniac, and disarming law-abiding citizen who did stop him.
That makes no sense to me.
I’m sure there now will be calls to ban this weapon or that weapon. Frankly, the government can ban whatever it wants, but it’s not going to deter someone bent on mass murder.
To me, the larger question is why we have so many people in the U.S. who are so inclined.
Pro-gun-control people always like to say that other countries don’t have mass shootings like the U.S. does, and that’s true.
But here’s my question: Is that because people in other countries can’t get their hands on guns? Or is it because they simply lack the desire to kill mass numbers of people?
I think it’s the latter.
And until we figure out what drives people to behave that way, we will have mass casualty events.
Whether it’s a gun, or a pressure cooker bomb or a moving truck, psychotic people bent on mass murder will find a way.
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