Guns — When Trump Can’t Even Tweet
“You’ve got to wonder,” Kelly said in a phone interview, whether the president would have had a
more intense reaction if the news reports suggested “the shooter was of a different ethnicity.”
During his government-shutdown-immigration rants, Trump kept pointing out
that the man who killed eight people with a truck in Manhattan had come to the country through a visa lottery system.
After the Las Vegas massacre, in which the murderer had purchased at least 55 weapons in the year leading up to the shooting, Kentucky’s Governor Bevin
seemed to feel the most unbelievable part was the call by “political opportunists … for more gun regs.” He tweeted: “You can’t regulate evil…”
Maybe not, but you can definitely try to disarm evil.
Meanwhile, our president is running a re-election campaign ad (“Oh God,” moaned the nation) which announces
that “Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” Do you think he feels responsible for the 15,583 gun violence deaths — suicides not included — that occurred during the first year he was president?
Another super-modest bipartisan bill aimed at beefing up the background check system was introduced after the church shooting in Texas,
in which the mass murderer never should have been cleared to buy a gun, even under the stupendously lenient American system.
Donald Trump — who yelled about “carnage” in big cities during his inauguration speech — has said not a word about the Kentucky shooting except to tweet his “thoughts
and prayers.” (Even that, commenters noted, came nearly 24 hours after the prime minister of Canada sent his sympathies.)
