The Left Needs To Stop Politicizing Tragedies

​Over the weekend, the entire nation was rocked by two mass shootings happening within 24 hours of one another, a particular rarity.
 
A Walmart in El Paso, Texas was shot up by a white supremacist who has been reported as having been inspired by the Christchurch, New Zealand shooter and according to reports of the shooter’s supposed manifesto, was angry at the rise in the Hispanic population in Texas and decided to kill people, possibly targeting Latinos.
 
A bar in Dayton, Ohio was also shot up Sunday morning, though it’s unclear if the two are related (and it’s unlikely).
 
In all, around 30 people died to the combined mass shootings and plenty more were injured. Thankfully, it appears as though police were quick to stop the shooting in Dayton, which could have been more deadly.
 
Of course, as these are fairly-developing stories, the facts will come out as more time goes on and I likely won’t be able to cover as much as I would like. However, what is often expected and tedious following a mass shooting is the fact that the tragic event, which literally takes innocent people’s lives, gets politicized to the point where people who support the 2nd Amendment are accused of having blood on their hands for this.
 
Every. Single. Time. Whenever there is a shooting, the gun is immediately blamed. Not the shooter or his or her motivations (unless they are beneficial to the Left), but the gun. This has led, predictably, to Democrats calling on Congress to cancel the Summer recess in order to pass more gun control legislation that will neither serve to prevent the next tragedy nor serve to alleviate the mourning souls of the families of the victims. Why? Because that would be trying to cure a symptom rather than a disease.
 
What is to blame here isn’t the tool of destruction. Far more people die to automobiles, disease, stabbings, doctor malpractice, etc. than they do in shootings. Even Neil DeGrasse Tyson understands this, having tweeted about it with some figures to back it up.
 
What is to blame isn’t as simple as “the gun did it” because that is not even remotely accurate. It was the person that did it and it was the lack of a strong mental health system in this country that gets us to this point (as well as other factors).
 
The Dayton shooter, according to schoolmates of his, had “kill” and “rape” lists. A massive red flag that has somehow been ignored.
 
But despite that, instead of addressing the actual issues like President Trump is doing, people are pointing fingers at each other. The Left-wing media will focus on the El Paso shooter because he is a white supremacist and they can use that as rhetoric against Trump, saying that it’s his own rhetoric that is similar to the shooter’s when nothing could be further from the truth.
 
The white supremacist shooter reportedly hates Hispanics. Trump does not hate Hispanics. The white supremacist shooter is a freaking white supremacist. Trump is not a white supremacist and has disavowed white supremacists well before he was even President. The white supremacist is a Leftist and Trump is not a Leftist.
 
But the media has been insisting for the past few years that Donald Trump is a white supremacist and as a result, Twitter hashtags like “#TrumpsTerrorists” arise, when placing the blame on him is idiotic (even though the El Paso shooter is a registered Democrat and he used Leftist language such as pro-climate change talking points where he said we were killing our planet, not that the Left will focus on that bit of the manifesto).
 
Simultaneously, they will ignore the Dayton shooter because he was a very open Leftist who often liked Leftists’ tweets and endorsed people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. On his Twitter bio, he did something only Leftists tend to do: identify himself as “he/him” to let people know what gender pronoun to use on him.
 
Beyond that, he literally had “leftist” in his Twitter bio. And he would often retweet and like tweets from Leftists such as the aforementioned Warren and Sanders, plus others who spew Leftist rhetoric surrounding the border, police, the ICE bomber being considered a martyr by ANTIFA, AOC calling the detention centers at the border “concentration camps”, and literally tweeted: “I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”
 
Oh, and he also said he loved Satan.
 
Had this shooting been the only one to have happened, the MSM would’ve pretended nothing even happened. After all, the story on the Virginia baseball game shooter, who was targeting Republicans, died pretty quickly (and no one on the Left was blaming Bernie Sanders and his rhetoric, despite it basically promoting the attack of right-wingers).
 
Two mass shootings are what are being talked about, with one’s rhetoric taking center stage and the other’s being ignored.
 
Because white supremacy has often been taught to so many people as being a right-wing ideology (when history literally proves otherwise), the media will focus solely on the El Paso shooting and say it was Trump’s fault (2020 Dems have certainly already done this) and that it is his rhetoric that led the white supremacist (who is also a Leftist, I will remind) to target Latinos and Hispanics.
 
In reality, it’s the Left’s rhetoric that has endangered Latinos and Hispanics. In conflating legal immigrants with illegal ones, by simply saying that Trump’s rhetoric is “anti-immigrant”, it leads people to be equally as confused and believe that all Hispanics and Latinos are the same, whether they came here legally or illegally.
 
Of course, the vast majority of people are not quite so dumb, but as we are talking about people with clear mental health issues, it’s important to point this out: people’s lies and narratives have consequences.
 
The Left will talk at length about the El Paso shooter and try and blame Trump for it, all-the-while ignoring stories about Trump supporters being punched, harassed or otherwise mistreated just for being Trump supporters.
 
Donald Trump’s rhetoric is against illegal immigration, not because he doesn’t like illegals, but because he doesn’t like them breaking THE LAW to enter the country. If an illegal immigrant were to be deported and then come back in through legal means, all would be well. But the media insists that Trump’s rhetoric is entirely racially-based, which can lead to some people, such as the El Paso shooter, to believe Latinos don’t belong here and killing them is justifiable.
 
Now, having gotten that out of the way, I can imagine some people may be trying to say that I, myself, am politicizing a tragedy after telling people not to do so and will call me hypocritical. I am not politicizing a tragedy, merely responding to the politicization that has surrounded this tragedy already.
 
Like I said, every single time there is a mass shooting, the Left basically jumps for joy at the chance to use it for political gain. And if you think I’m exaggerating, Kamala Harris literally sent out a fundraising e-mail asking people for money following the tragedy, naming the El Paso and Dayton shootings in the e-mail. She is literally trying to profit from the tragedies, so don’t tell me that I shouldn’t say the Left is happy when shootings happen because they are.
 
It is a chance for them to insist we take action against gun ownership and purchases, when all that will do is hinder law-abiding citizens and help law-breakers in the long-run.
 
When tragedies like these happen, instead of putting our issues aside out of respect for the fallen and in mourning of them alongside the families and the communities, we further the divide that already exists and begin blaming people like Trump, the NRA, conservatives, gun owners, etc. Unless the shooter was a Muslim or a Leftist, in which case the Left jumps into defense mode to only attack the gun (and still blame conservatives somehow) while trying to shield Islam, hypocritically saying that not all Muslims are like this (which is true) and that Islam had nothing to do with it (not true) while attacking Trump and conservatives and saying shootings like last weekend’s have everything to do with our ideology.
 
Rather than be mourned over, victims of a tragedy are made into political tools to further the Left’s agenda. Rather than address the root causes of the problems, we focus on the tools used to bring death, destruction and desolation. A life lost is a life lost and it’s a tragedy, no matter the manner in which it was lost.
 
When there is a stabbing, people don’t tend to jump at the chance to spread “knife control” propaganda (unless you’re in the U.K.) because it is impossible to enforce (even full gun control is impossible to enforce, even if you were to get rid of the 2nd Amendment).
 
When there is a terrorist attack in which a vehicle was used to run people over, people don’t jump at the chance to spread “car control” because that would be stupid. It is only when a shooting happens when the actual tool is blamed more than the individual or individuals who perpetrated the heinous act of violence.
 
It doesn’t help anyone at any capacity because, again, you are not addressing the root cause. There are more guns in America than there are people, and while estimates vary, plenty of those are also illegal (far from the majority, but still) with some estimates saying there are over 100 million illegal firearms in the country (though it’s nearly impossible to accurately estimate unregistered and illegal guns, so take that figure with a grain of salt).
 
Still, given the estimates for gun ownership, such as the fact that there are 120.5 guns per 100 people in the U.S. (according to Small Arms Survey), meaning, statistically speaking, every person in the country owns at least one gun, it is quite clear that gun ownership and guns in and of themselves are not the problem, as we would all be long dead by now if they were.
 
Regardless of the estimates you may want to use for gun ownership and even illegal gun ownership, it’s quite evident that the problem lies elsewhere. Namely, mental health issues and, in my opinion, the fact that we live in a post-Christian America.
 
Ignoring and mocking God tends to have consequences for countries in terms of either being blessed by Him or being cursed by Him. And while I’m not usually one to claim that any given tragedy, man-made or natural, is because of our faithlessness to God, I understand that as He is the Sovereign King of the Universe, He has control over everything that happens, good or bad. And He has historically brought both blessing and curse to the people of Israel, blessing in time of faith and curse in time of disobedience to Him.
 
Regardless of whether or not you think that has anything to do with these shootings, one thing is clear: we must pray to God for healing. And while there may be those who say that “thoughts and prayers aren’t enough”, don’t pay them any attention because those are people who, themselves, are not faithful or pray to Him.
 
Prayer works, even if it’s not quite in the way we imagine. So we should continue to pray for the victims of the shootings, as well as their families and communities. Pray that they would be healed and that they would come to Him in their time of need, that those who might need saving would be saved and those who have already been saved may find comfort in Him.
 
I will only pay attention to those who would seek to divide us because it is my job to do so. Apart from that, I will also continue to pray to God that He might heal our nation and draw us closer to Him as one nation under God.
 
James 5:16
“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”
 
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