RIGHT SPEAK: Progressives’ Cynical Exploitation of Mass Shootings

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, for example, 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. Fifty-three 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. I guess “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”––unless one wants to depict blacks as helpless victims of “racism,” powerless to control their behavior. By the way, that claim has been an argument for slavery and segregation going all the way back to Aristotle. 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.

More useful for the left are the deranged white losers who make up most mass shooters. No doubt environmental factors or mental illness somewhat account for their actions, but deterministic arguments always collide with the fact that millions of individuals with the same environmental or psychological challenges don’t go on murder sprees. In the end we don’t know why these shootings occur, because for all our pseudo-scientific “knowledge” about human behavior, it is still a mystery. Dostoevsky is closer to the mark than are deterministic explanations: Such horrors happen because a soul alienated from God is free to choose even murder simply because he can.

All that, however, is mere religious superstition and obscurantism to our enlightened “brights.” Talking about our spiritual alienation created by more than a century of radical secularism is so old-fashioned and unsophisticated, the argument of “smelly” Wal-Mart shoppers and “bitter clingers” to guns and religion. How much easier––and politically useful–– to focus on the material cause: guns and “gun violence.” 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.”

Read the rest from Bruce Thornton HERE.