The liberal website Slate has taken post-Newtown commentary to a new low by tracking the amount of deaths via firearm that have occurred since December. It’s purely an emotional ploy to show how awful America, our right to bear arms, and gun owners really are, and how the perpetuate carnage. Hence, we must act, and pass ineffectual policies like an assault weapons ban. What’s odd is that this interactive map was posted yesterday, when President Obama testily chastised the country for Congress's failure thus far to enact his anti-gun agenda.
Furthermore, its seems Chris Kirk and Dan Kois, the two men compiling this butcher’s bill, are lusting for more macabre news, urging readers to help them "draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America" by tweeting "@GunDeaths with a citation" of "gun death[s] in your community" that "[aren't] represented here."
Tragically, murders occur everyday, but when did we decide to make it a science project to track the dead? Is it because the president said we should act? Kirk and Kois should know that violent crime has gone down astronomically over the past decade. So, this attempt to paint our society as a bloody hellish abyss is craven to the extreme.
Returning to the original question, would Kirk and Kois have conducted this study if Barack Obama didn’t find it a priority? After all, the media is in love with him, but the feeling isn’t mutual. And would everyone be as vociferous in his or her reactions to Newtown if the victims were black and hailed from a liberal jurisdiction like Chicago which has among the nation's toughest gun laws?
If we’re going to track murders, why just track the ones where a gun was involved? What about knifes, baseball bats, cars, alcohol (drunk driving/vehicular manslaughter), arson, torture, rape, or strangulation?
Far from seeking to illuminate and inform, the objective here is to ghoulishly capitalize on tragedy in service of legislation that undercuts Americans' fundamental 2nd Amendment rights. It's tasteless, classless, and cynical, but sadly par for the course for online liberal media outlets.
