Thread by @JewhadiTM

Progressives’ Cynical Exploitation of Mass Shootings

The callous privileging of one sort of death over another frontpagemag.com/fpm/274819/pro…

The second multiple-victim shooting in Texas in a week brought out the usual clichés and useless policy prescriptions from the progressive media and Democrats running in the presidential primary.

And also as usual, the protestations of being “heartbroken,” and the demands for banning and confiscating certain weapons, are rote responses that apart from having little material value, display a cynical exploitation of suffering for political gain.

One wonders why all this “heartbreak” and “thoughts”––“prayers” are now verboten for progressives––are never publicized about the lethal violence in Chicago, Baltimore, and other blue-state fiefs. 53 people died in August from mass shootings, an unusually high amount.

The August toll in the Windy City was 46 murdered––almost a quarter fewer than last year. And these sorts of numbers happen every month of the year in Chicago totaling 539 dead in 2018. But do we hear politicians preening their “heartbreak” over these deaths?

Are not those lives as precious as those of mass shooting victims? Aren’t those families of the victims just as devastated?

Most of the victims in Chicago and Baltimore are black, as are most of the murderers.

“Black lives matter” only when the police are involved, or the perpetrator isn’t black. Black-on-black crime doesn’t fit the narrative of “racism,” “white privilege,” or “white supremacism.”

And just who created the character-degrading, family-destroying, federally subsidized blue-city hell-holes that comprise the “environment” manipulating black people into crime? No wonder race-industry progressives don’t want to call attention to these grisly facts.

After the latest Texas shooting, Dem primary candidates pounced on the opportunity to exploit the killings. Corey Booker hit every stale gun-control nostrum in his tweet:

“Beginning on Day One in office, I will take executive action to reduce gun violence—closing dangerous loopholes in gun sales, cracking down on gun manufacturers, and investing in communities impacted by gun violence.”

The banality of these threats is equaled by their complete emptiness: what “loopholes”? “Cracking down” how? “Investing” in what?

Since 1965 we’ve “invested” $20 trillion in dysfunctional “communities,” and little has changed other than the size of the redistributionist feds and the debt used to finance these “investments.”

At least “Beto” O’Rourke is more honest, if also incoherent: “I want to be very clear. The government will not take away your guns. But if you own guns, you will be forced to sell them to the government.” And that logical contradiction is “very clear”?

Finally, we all know why the Dems circle mass shootings like buzzards. Progressivism is founded on the principle of serial “crises” that our Constitution and its divided government are incapable of resolving.

Technocratic elites in federal bureaus and agencies armed with new “sciences” must be empowered to bring their superior knowledge to bear on such crises.

The people who are supposed to be sovereign and self-governing also can’t address a “crisis” through their state and local governments, or with civil societies outside of government’s reach.

To progs, their common sense and practical wisdom are relics of a less enlightened age in which tradition, faith, and experience guided action and set the limits to which improvements or solutions are possible given a complex, flawed human nature.

And if there is no crisis? Then create one, and offer intrusive government policies and regulations as the solution to the crisis.

Mass shootings are a problem, not a crisis to be exploited. We the people should do whatever we can, but draconian gun control has decades of failure that suggests we should look to families, churches, communities and states, rather than to a overweening federal bureaucracy.

That solution is merely a device for aggrandizing partisan political power at the expense of our freedom.