Making Hay While the Sun Shines: The Left Politicizes Elliot Rodger

You have to hand it to the liberals: they never miss an opportunity to convert tragedy into political gain. In the wake of Elliot Rodger’s six murders–three with a knife and three with a gun, plus injuries inflicted with an automobile–they are calling, once again, for gun confiscation. I guess they are, anyway. As usual, they denounce conservatives and say things like “end the madness,” but confiscation seems to be the point of it all.

Once again, though, liberals are denied the holy grail of mass murderers–a conservative perpetrator, preferably a follower of the Tea Party. Rodger, like most of the others, was a devoted liberal. He followed the Young Turks on YouTube, a far-left group led by a goof named Cenk Uygur who once was an MSNBC host. So, foiled once again, liberals can make only their broader propaganda points.

Michael Moore deserves to be singled out for special condemnation. On Facebook, he purported to respond to requests for comment:

We are a people easily manipulated by fear which causes us to arm ourselves with a quarter BILLION guns in our homes that are often easily accessible to young people, burglars, the mentally ill and anyone who momentarily snaps.

So was Rodger was manipulated by a fear of conservative ascendancy propagated by the Young Turks? Apparently so.

While other countries have more violent pasts (Germany, Japan), more guns per capita in their homes (Canada [mostly hunting guns]), and the kids in most other countries watch the same violent movies and play the same violent video games that our kids play, no one even comes close to killing as many of its own citizens on a daily basis as we do — and yet we don’t seem to want to ask ourselves this simple question: “Why us? What is it about US?”

Heh. Moore hasn’t checked the numbers. There are many places with murder rates higher than ours. Pretty much all of sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, Russia, and others. Actually, the white murder rate in the U.S. is comparable to other Western countries.

Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. None of them are committed by the majority gender, women. Hmmm, why is that?

I think testosterone has something to do with it. But wait! Elliot Rodger’s mother is Indonesian. Doesn’t that count for something? Apparently not, when liberal memes are at stake.

Actually, mass shootings are pretty equally distributed among ethnic groups. The worst mass shooter in American history was an Asian-American, Seung-Hui Cho, and an African-American, John Muhammad, murdered at least ten people in the D.C. area. And, of course, the overall homicide rate among African-Americans is something like eight times the white rate.

When the NRA says, “Guns don’t kill people — people kill people,” they’ve got it half-right. Except I would amend it to this: “Guns don’t kill people — Americans kill people.”

Murder occurs in every society, but at widely varying rates. Switzerland and Canada have high rates of gun ownership, but low homicide rates. White Americans own lots of guns but commit murders at a similarly low rate. While it is true that “Americans kill people,” some categories of Americans kill a lot more people than others–a fact which liberals understandably try to obscure.

This, however, has little to do with mass murders or serial killers. Mass murderers, while very rare, are found everywhere; to cite just one recent example, the train station attack in China in which 29 people were murdered. With knives. And one of the worst school massacres ever took place in Scotland.

As usual, the Left’s effort to gain political advantage from a murderous rampage by one of its own goes nowhere.

Beyond that, some might argue that Rodger was a prototypical liberal male, only carried to a pathological extreme. Consider the profile: socially awkward, convinced of his own brilliance but not notably successful in life, hungry for revenge against those who have done better despite their obvious inferiority, eager to gain power over others, but through political influence rather than firearms–is this not a typical liberal on Twitter, or elsewhere on the internet? Or, for that matter, in the Obama administration? Isn’t state power the legal path to the long-awaited revenge of the liberal nerds? This strikes me as a plausible suggestion.

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