Talk about missing the point
by digby
Earlier today, David Frum wrote a series of tweets explaining the rules that opponents of gun law reform attempt to impose on conversations about it:
Another mass casualty shooting, this time at Washington Navy Yard.
In wake of this most recent mass-casualty shooting, it is important that we all respect the feelings of America’s gun enthusiasts.
Observing a few simple rules of etiquette will help the post-shooting conversation to proceed in appropriate ways.
Rule 1: It is “ghoulish” to suggest in any way that the easy availability of guns might in any way enable gun slaughter.
Rule 2: Gun crime in the president’s hometown proves that guns anywhere else are no fit topic of conversation.
Rule 3: All gun owners are to be complimented as responsible and law-abiding until they personally have hurt themselves or somebody else
Rule 4: Any attempt to stop mass casualty shootings is “political.” Allowing them to continue is”non-political.”
Rule 5: Gun ownership is essential to freedom, as in Serbia & Guatemala. Gun restrictions lead to tyranny, as in Australia & Canada.
I think that’s right. And who else but Erick Erickson would rush to prove it:
As a shooter roamed the Navy Yard, a relatively secure facility, and as people who worked there were dead or dying or bleeding, David Frum became a twitter stream about gun control — comparing America to third world countries.
At the time, we did not know if it was terrorism. We did not know if there were multiple shooters. We did not know how many were wounded. We did not know how many were dead.
Yet some decided it was, in the heat of the moment, already time to drag race, politics, and policy arguments into the fray.
I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Even I’ve learned how inappropriate it is.
There are people calling frantically, I’m sure, right now wanting to know if their husband, brother, wife, sister, mom, or dad is alive or dead. There are others being told about their dead or dying or wounded or safe loved ones.
I would not dare step in the way of America’s national past time of bitching about the politics of everything on twitter, but there has to be a better time for it than as the temperature of bodies on the ground in the Navy Yard are not even yet cold.
Life is more than politics. And if you don’t understand that, you are one seriously maladjusted person.
Grow the hell up, people. You too David Frum.
* He also took some conservatives to task for tweeting that the shooter was a black man, which was apparently some sort of comment on Trayvon Martin and black people shooting other black people. Huh??