In the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown most people are still trying to get to grips with the enormity of this crime. Twenty young children killed and six teaching staff.
It is hard to take in.
However, certain types of politicians and politicos, who are not given to reflection, are trotting out their particular agendas with indecent haste.
Gawker draws attention to Oregon State representative, Dennis Richardson’s crass comments:
“If I had been a teacher or the principal at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and if the school district did not preclude me from having access to a firearm, either by concealed carry or locked in my desk, most of the murdered children would still be alive, and the gunman would still be dead, and not by suicide. “
Incredibly, Mike Huckabee blames the killings on the separation of Church and State.
According to Pink News, Westboro Baptist Church blames Gays for the shooting.
Salon points out that James Dobson blames gays, abortion for shootings and Mary Elizabeth Williams blasts apart Mike Huckabee’s oafish views.
Astonishingly, someone with a particular affliction uses the killings in Newtown to attack Jews.
JHate explains:
[Warning: links to racist material, as a matter of public record.]
“On his December 14 radio show, American anti-Semitic activist Mark Glenn reveals that the villains responsible for the Sandy Hook school massacre are…wait for it…the Jews. “When you see these kinds of things happening,” Glenn says, “you see these kids basically acting out this program that has been installed on their hard drives since they were born, you have to go to the source. Who programmed them? Who taught them that it was OK to do things like this? And again, for me the bottom line is that it’s the Jewish mainstream media….” Glenn is a longtime anti-Semite who is a commentator for Press TV, a semi-official Iranian broadcast network. In recent months he has also founded an internet radio network featuring a roster of anti-Semitic hosts, based on the blogtalkradio.com broadcasting platform.”
Glenn has a long history as an active antisemite and not unsurprisingly, is a friend of Gilad Atzmon.
The dire, Brendan O’Neill at the Torygraph poses a question without a moment’s intellectual engagement:
“There is one question that the pious critics of America’s so-called gun culture cannot answer. If mass school shootings like that in Connecticut really are a product of the apparently mad Second Amendment, of the fact that guns are widely available in the US, then why did such shootings only take off in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Guns have been available in the US for more than two centuries, but multiple-victim shootings in schools, of the sort that rocked Connecticut and Columbine before it, are a very modern phenomenon. It cannot be simply the availability of guns that leads people to massacre children or their fellow students, or else there would have been horrors like this throughout American history. “
Obviously, the difference was the availability of assault rifles, a product of modern technology. That is part of the reason, all of which eluded the contrarian O’Neill.
The Nation demonstrates how assault rifles are available at Walmart in the US.
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