CNN convened a town hall forum for President Obama to bloviate on issues of “gun violence” last night. I’m posting the complete video below. CNN has posted a transcript here (along with a two-minute compilation of highlights). The NRA declined CNN’s invitation to attend. The repulsive radical Chicago cleric Michael Pfleger was on hand. Reverend Wright was apparently not available.
I wonder if CNN thought about inviting John Lott. If they didn’t, I would guess it’s because they are unfamiliar with his work, or because he would make their heads explode. One or the other. Lott argues the proposition More Guns, Less Crime and deconstructs just about every proposition Obama holds on the subject, including his purported belief in the Second Amendment (Lott interacted with Obama at the University of Chicago Law School). Audio of Levin’s interview with Lott this week is posted here (about 20 minutes). Lott’s NR column “Obama’s gun-control order is dictatorial, and it won’t work” is also on point.
It was left to the beautiful Taya Kyle, widow of the late Chris Kyle, to make the case in her own way (video below, about six mintues).
Mrs. Kyle puts it this way:
I appreciate you taking the time to come here. And I think that your message of hope is something I agree with. And I think it’s great. And I think that by creating new laws, you do give people hope. The thing is that the laws that we create don’t stop these horrific things from happening, right? And that’s a very tough pill to swallow.
We want to think that we can make a law and people will follow it. By the very nature of their crime, they’re not following it. By the very nature of looking at the people who hurt our loved ones here, I don’t know that any of them would have been stopped by the background check. And yet, I crave that desire for hope, too.
And so I think part of it we have to recognize that we cannot outlaw murder because people who are murdering, right, are — they’re breaking the law, but they also don’t have a moral code that we have. And so they could do the same amount of damage with a pipe bomb. The problem is that they want to murder.
And I’m wondering why it wouldn’t be a better use of our time to give people hope in a different way, to say, “You know what? We” — well first of all, actually, let me back up to that. Because with the laws, I know that at least last I heard, the federal prosecution of gun crimes was like 40 percent. And what I mean by that is that there are people lying on these forms already and we’re not prosecuting them. So there’s an issue there, right?
But instead, if we can give people hope and say also during this time while you’ve been president, we are at the lowest murder rate in our country — all-time low murders. We’re at an all-time high of gun ownership, right?
I’m not necessarily saying the two are correlated, but what I’m saying is that we’re at an all-time low for murder rate. That’s a big deal. And yet I think most of us in this country feel like it could happen at any moment. It could happen to any of us at any time.
And I’m almost finished. Just when — when you talk about the NRA, and after a mass shooting that gun sales go up, I would argue that it’s not necessarily that I think somebody’s going to come take my gun from me, but I want the hope — and the hope that I have the right to protect myself; that I don’t end up to be one of these families; that I have the freedom to carry whatever weapon I feel I need, just like your wife said on that farm (ph). You know, I don’t — the sheriff’s aren’t going to get to my house either.
And I understand that background checks aren’t necessarily going to stop me from getting a gun, but I also know that they wouldn’t have stopped any of the people here in this room from killing. And so it seems like almost a false sense of hope.
So why not celebrate where we are? I guess that’s my real question is…
OBAMA: Well…
QUESTION: Celebrate that we’re good people, and 99.9 percent of us are never going to kill anyone.
Obama lectures. He hectors. He condescends. He misleads. He tells whoppers. He gives us the old-time BS. He wags his finger. He disparages his opponents. He personalizes the issues. He pulls the tools out of his community organizer toolbox and adds his own monumental self-regard to the production. This act has gotten very, very old.
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