Simple Answers

Over at The Daily Wire, Matt Walsh asks:

Why Does The Media Care More About The Parkland Shooting Than It Ever Did About Las Vegas?

Well, that’s an easy one. While the Vegas shooter killed far more people than did the adolescent mope in Parkland, the Vegas victims weren’t children, ergo no outrage could be stoked up and turned into anti-gun hysteria. (And to be brutally frank, the fact that the Vegas victims were country music fans — i.e. more likely to be Deplorables or people from Flyover Country — made them  just statistics as far as the Left was concerned. Conservatives weren’t going to be converted to the anti-gun side, but with children as victims… well, all bets were off.)

Also, the Vegas shooter’s motives were, and remain inscrutable because he’s dead: he was just a lone nutcase (and maybe a Democrat, just like Steven Scalise’s would-be assassin), and anything could have triggered him off to plan so large-scale a shooting. More to the point: every single gun he purchased and used for his mayhem was purchased quite legally, and no laws — existing or projected — could have stopped him (short of a wholesale gun ban and confiscation). And he was an adult, so none of the usual hooks was going to work. The only thing the media could get a fingernail on was “bump stocks” — something which keen gun guys knew about, but few others. Banning bump stocks was never going to ruffle anyone’s hairstyle, and even a failure to ban the stupid things couldn’t be used to tar the gun industry because it’s quite useless to rave about something used by about 0.00001% of the population.

But a screwed-up kid with an AR-15, and innocent chilluns gunned down in a school? Ooooh, small wonder the anti-gun brigades ordered a general mobilization, because there were so many hooks to hang gun control on: “underage” gun buying, “assault rifle” bogeymen — you name it, there was fodder for the anti-gun movement — which is why they were so quick to organize town meetings, parades and getting the Usual Suspects (Schumer etc.) to drone on and on about how Something Must Be Done No Matter What. And even better, the NRA could be used as a scapegoat much more easily for Parkland than for Vegas, How so? Consider these two statements:

“We should ban assault rifles!”
“No we shouldn’t.”
“Oh, so then you’re in favor of killing country music fans!”

…and:

“We should ban assault rifles!”
“No we shouldn’t.”
“Oh, so then you’re in favor of killing innocent schoolchildren!”

The first argument is risible, the second compelling.

That’s why the media and the anti-gunners have been pretty much shtum about the Vegas shooting, and hair-on-fire screaming about the Parkland tragedy. It really is that simple.

Yeah, I know it’s a cold-blooded and cynical rationale for using one and not the other to further an agenda and to use children as pawns rather than country music fans. But if there’s one thing we know about the Left — in any country — it’s that they pretty much define “cold-blooded and cynical”. The end, for them, always justifies the means.

In the meantime, let’s get the fire lit under the cauldron of oil so we can boil the little Florida fucker to death.

7 comments

  1. While you are boiling people, don’t forget the Sheriff and and least 5 other members of his department and some top FBI officials yet to be named.

    1. They were merely incompetent. The root of this tragedy was the Obama-pushed “look the other way when children are committing felonies” policy that kept the little bastard on the streets with no criminal record.

      1. No, they were complicit, not incompetent.

        Nobody forced them to stay on at those jobs. They could’ve resigned in protest of laughably stupid “ignore minority crime” policies and gotten jobs elsewhere.

  2. A very good, old friend of mine, a retired lawyer in Dallas called me last week and asked me about the NRA and told me it would be a good thing if they were to, “Get out in front of this gun thing, taking the lead with better regulations about what can be sold and who can buy it.” He was trying to help and we had a decent conversation where I explained a few things to him. One is that the AR platform was designed and sold as a civilian gun in the mid 1950’s using a nice small bullet that is not big enough to shoot deer in most states. His reply was, “it is so powerful it will go through windows and doors and kill children.” Mine was yes, it is a bullet but not a very powerful. I talked about .308’s and my old 30-06 and .303 and how they are effective at a distance.

    After visiting about all the stuff he was seeing on CNN and listening to my take on things I ended our conversation thanking my friend for calling me, I told him I understood we had different points of view on the situation and we would talk some more in the future. They don’t know what they don’t know.

  3. Very reminiscent of a comment I’ve made elsewhere.

    Guns, to liberals, are a black box system. They know bullets come out one end (sometimes), but the actual systems are a mystery to them (this is why you see such charmingly idiotic ideas as ballistic fingerprinting and smartgun technology spouted by leftists).

    Reynolds makes a good point about nonleftists needing to pick up media properties and start pushing OUR side of the story. We’re never gonna win the culture wars if the bad guys get to write the stories.

  4. And let us not question the fact that there was almost no screaming media headlines play over the Repubs who were shot by that democrap at that ballfield awhile back… Ooops my bad; definitely didn’t fit the democrap-operatives-with-bylines narrative.

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