Editor to Giffords: A terrible injury is not a license to lie
The left has a long history of trotting out victims; those who will gladly use the victim card as a device to put politics over morality and truth in order to push an agenda most good people would otherwise never accept. After observing how the far left politicized 9/11 this writer decided that he would never be intimidated into silence again by such underhanded tactics. What politicization you ask? There are many examples, but the one that stands above the rest are the "four 9/11 widows" who claimed to speak for all 9/11 victims. These political operatives, often called the Jersey Girls, behaved as celebrities while engaging in the most histrionic demagoguery against President Bush. I remember one of them saying (paraphrasing):
It was President Bush's fault that so many died on 9/11 because when we were under attack he was reading to school children. That's where he was on the morning of 9/11.
These four women, opposed very vocally and often ridiculously, every action President Bush took to protect the nation and when called to back up their statements they would attack you for daring to be so insensitive to their victim-hood, as if these four political hacks were infallible. The whole point of "the victim card" is to use the grief to make a political point while preventing anyone from responding. After the Jersey Girls wore out "their 15 minutes" with their antics Pulizer Prize winning journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz undressed the Jersey Girls in her famous piece in the Wall Street Journal. A prominent Marxist once made the point clearly:
Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice. We repudiate all morality which proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas which are outside the class conception. In our opinion, morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of the class war.
And this brings us to former Member of Congress Gabby Giffords who had this to say in a recent op-ed piece she wrote:
What they will do is create one fair system for all gun buyers, instead of the giant loophole we have now. Right now, we have one system where responsible gun owners take a background check — my husband, Mark, took one just last month, and it took 5 minutes and 36 seconds. I remember waiting a lot longer than that for the subway to take me to my office when I lived in New York City! And then we have a second system for those who don’t want to take a background check. Those people — criminals, or people suffering from mental illness, like the young man who shot me — can buy as many guns as they want on the Internet or at a gun show, no questions asked. That doesn’t make sense. We know how to fix it — by establishing a universal background check system. And yet some of our elected officials are not listening. Some even say this legislation shouldn’t get a vote in the United States Congress.
Giffords clearly states that the young man who shot her, Jarrod Loughner, did not go through a back ground check. That is not true. Loughner most certainly did pass a back ground check and she well knows it, as it has been widely reported. Giffords is lying and pointing this out is critically important for several reasons. Everyone who buys firearm from an exhibitor at a gun show goes through a back ground check. Private sales between collectors at gun shows who are not licensed dealers are rare. Instances of private collectors selling guns to genuine criminals are so rare that it is not able to be statistically measured reliably. The first elephant in the room that Giffords is lying about and helping to paint a false picture of to help conceal is this - what she is calling a "universal back-ground check" is in reality a civilian gun registration scheme. A way to know what honest civilians has what guns, so that the database can be used to data-mine those people for political purposes, up to and including eventual confiscation. Such people tend to be the political enemies of far left Democrats. See ATF Seeks ‘Massive’ Database of Gun Owner's Personal Info: ‘Assets, Relatives, Associates and More’.
One newspaper printed such a list in New York solely for the purpose of smearing gun owners, violating their privacy and endangering them. Quite simply, there is no reason to believe that such data will not be abused. The Patriot Act has strong provisions against the abuse of the tools it granted government, but we have all seen what has happened in its application.
The second elephant in the room that Giffords is concealing is just why Jarrod Loughner was able to pass the back ground check and buy the handgun that he used. The case of Jarrod Loughner is especially egregious as he had multiple contacts with university police and the sheriff's department. The police reports show that they knew Loughner was dangerously mentally ill. Arizona has the law in place to have people forcibly evaluated and all police and/or the sheriff had to do was dial a 1-800 number to get it done. The sheriff's department did not do so because Loughner's mother is a supervisor in the county parks department. That same sheriff, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, fellow Democrat and friend of Gabby Giffords, publicly blamed Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin for the shooting.
If Sheriff Dupnik had simply done his job and used the tools the law gave him, Loughner would have been entered in to the national instant check system and would have failed his back ground check. He would also have had a real chance to get treatment for his severe mental incapacity.
If Giffords is genuinely concerned about the quality of back ground checks, where is her critique of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who is as responsible for her terrible injuries as anyone? Where is her critique of the Obama Administration who is failing to enforce the back ground check system we have now? It stopped 70,000 ineligible people from getting guns, over 15,000 of which were felons trying to trick the system, and guess how many the Obama Administration prosecuted for trying to get a gun – 44.
If Giffords is genuine in her concern for guns on the street, where is her critique of the Obama Administration who sent thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels in an effort to blame the following bloodshed to "make the case for more gun regulations"? The administration was outed by their own ATF agents.
Instead, Giffords is a willing participant in what is nothing more than a political attack on 80 million innocent gun owners, most of whom oppose what President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership is doing. Giffords can be sure that the vast majority of those 80 million gun owners, Americans, including this very writer, prayed for her speedy recovery again and again. Today some of the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims were taken to Capital Hill on the taxpayers dollar to lobby members of Congress to pass this registration scheme. Parents of victims who were not fooled and do not support the gun registration scheme were not invited to speak. Are their dead children somehow less precious? Why are they denied the same opportunity to speak to Congress?