Can’t we think of the real victims — gun owners?
by digby
I wrote about how the Republicans are turning the gun issue back on Democrats today for Salon:
We have all been harshly schooled by the right wing in recent days about the inappropriateness of talking about policy in the aftermath of a mass murder. It’s very rude. Possibly the worst thing anyone can do at times such as these is to try to find reasons for the actions and attempt to find some way to avoid tragedy in the future. This is known as “politicizing” a tragedy and it’s very upsetting to the delicate sensibilities of our conservative patriots.
In the wake of the Charleston murders last week, both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made strong statements renewing calls for gun safety legislation. Republicans candidates joked about how much they loved their guns. And the pundit response was predictably hysterical. The usual suspects made the predictable vacuous observation that other countries have mass shootings too, as if that somehow mitigates the fact that the United States is the only western nation to turn it into a national pastime. They believe there is no need to acknowledge the fact that Americans are 20 times as likely to die from gun violence as citizens of other developed countries. And we certainly needn’t worry about trifles such as this:
Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average.
To even mention such things in the wake of the latest round of killing is boorish and disrespectful to gun owners.
Interestingly, none of them seem to think that the commentary blaming the victims for failing to be like movie heroes and shooting the gun out of the perpetrator’s hand before he even had a chance to fire and hurt someone is out of line. (That must be the scenario they see or they would be endorsing the idea that the best we can hope for is for there not to be quite so many dead bodies. But they wouldn’t say that would they?)
Still, most of these gun proliferation advocates aren’t as bad as this South Carolina elected official, who said, “These people sat in there and waited their turn to be shot. That’s sad that somebody in there with the means of self-defense could have stopped this… why didn’t somebody just do something? I mean, you got one skinny person shooting a gun. I mean, we need to take and do what you can.”
(He did apologize later, so that’s good.)