A BLAZE OF SHAME

As we all stand aghast at the atrocity in Las Vegas, one of the many things that grinds my teeth is hearing the talking heads on TV talk about the evil POS who perpetrated it “going out in a blaze of glory.”  A blaze of what?!?

They should call it a blaze of shame, because there can be no glory in the cowardly murder of the innocent.

He literally shot fish in a barrel: from his aerie, with a rifle equipped with a mechanical device to enhance speed of fire, on a bipod on a laboriously-created platform in his hotel suite, to shoot at tens of thousands of people who were packed like sardines in a two-acre venue.

Naturally, the first cries before the blood had dried came from Hillary Clinton and those like her: “Ban silencers, which would have made it worse!”  “Ban private ownership of machine guns,” no legal example of which was used here; only one of which since 1934 has to my knowledge been used to commit murder.  (And that one case involved a police officer, who claimed it went off by accident.) See here.

And of course, the cry is now “Ban bump-fire type stocks, etc.”, even though to my knowledge this is the first time that device has been used to commit murder, too.

It’s human nature when we see a terrible thing happen to feel and say, “We must do Something!”  Unfortunately, that tends to quickly turn into, “We must blame Someone!”

That someone, naturally, is gun owners and the NRA, in the eyes of those committed to left-wing agendas.  At least one pundit from “the port side” has called for NRA to be declared a terrorist organization, and another has called for white males who own a lot of guns and ammunition to be “profiled.”  A CBS attorney was fired for tweeting that she couldn’t feel sorry for the victims at the country music concert in Las Vegas, because she assumed they must be “repugs”… Republicans.  Talk about profiling…

Amidst all this shameful behavior, though, we’ve seen things which make us proud to be Americans. The ordinary American citizens at the concert who shielded other people’s bodies with their own, and risked being killed to drag others out of the field of fire.  The splendid performance of Las Vegas’ emergency services personnel, from the police to the firefighter/paramedics to the staffs at the hospitals.

There is much more to learn about this atrocity. Law enforcement is dealing with one of the most complicated crime scenes in American history, and the background investigation will also take a considerable amount of time.  Doubtless, more examples of American heroism will surface.  So, unfortunately, will more examples of shallow political ambition and “political identity” hatred.