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Fort Hood aftermath: Daley blames guns, WA Times blames Clinton
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Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has given new ammunition to gun rights advocates with his astonishing suggestion that the Fort Hood massacre was made possible because “America loves guns.”
Daley had been touring a school project on Monday of this week that expands the city’s Arabic language program when reporters asked whether the thought the Fort Hood incident would spark a backlash against Muslims. His reaction, captured on video, has been raising eyebrows since it flashed across the Internet, and it reaffirms what Mark Twain once observed: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
“Everyday in society,” Daley said, “somebody is being killed. Unfortunately, America loves guns. We love guns to a point where that, uh, we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group. You don’t blame a society, an immigrant community because of actions of one group...one individual. You cannot say that.”
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.—Mark Twain
So Daley, a perennial gun prohibitionist, instead blames firearms. His remarks stunned Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, who had just last week taken to task the president of Washington CeaseFire for trying to exploit the murder of a Seattle police officer in order to push a gun ban agenda in the Evergreen State.
Gottlieb was raked over the coals for that by Seattle Weekly columnist Nina Shapiro, whose colleague, veteran reporter Rick Anderson, authored a lengthy and unflattering piece about the veteran gun rights advocate in the current issue of the Seattle Weekly. I wrote about the Shapiro piece here, and she has gotten a considerably negative reader response on her Daily Weekly blog.
The attacks have not deterred Gottlieb, who seems to enjoy mixing it up with gun control proponents.
“Daley has an agenda,” he said in a press release, “that he shares with other anti-gun extremists. They will exploit any tragedy to pursue their goal of public disarmament and destruction of the Second Amendment. Whether it is the assassination of a Seattle police officer, the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, or the horrible body count of crime victims that has piled up in Chicago under Daley’s regime, they will dance through the blood toward the nearest sympathetic microphone to push their cause.”
Would Daley blame cars for the highway carnage created by drunk drivers? -- Alan Gottlieb
Gottlieb accused the Chicago mayor of “moral bankruptcy.” In the press release he alluded to a lawsuit that has just been filed against the Daley administration by Chicago’s own inspector general, alleging that the Daley regime has been interfering with an investigation about possible wrongdoing by city employees, past and present.
Daley, and perhaps Shapiro and Anderson, might have an issue with the Washington Times. In Wednesday morning’s edition, the Times editorialized that a ban on firearms possession by soldiers on military bases was instituted under Bill Clinton when he had only been in office two months back in March 1993. The revelation caught many by surprise, and the newspaper went for the political jugular:
“Thirteen dead bodies in a Texas morgue are the ultimate fruit of gun-control illogic - in which guns are so feared that government regulation even tries to keep them out of the hands of trained soldiers.”
It is hard to believe that we don't trust soldiers with guns on an Army base when we trust these very same men in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Clinton's deadly rules even disarmed officers, the most trusted members of the military charged with leading enlisted soldiers in combat. Six of the dead and wounded had commissions.- Washington Times
One might argue that the Washington Times, and perhaps even Gottlieb, are also trying to exploit the killings to push an agenda of “re-armament,” except that neither of them started this exploitation.
For the Seattle Weekly, it may be that the newspaper views Gottlieb as a symbol of a pro-gun lifestyle it finds distasteful and would like to marginalize.
For Daley, the Fort Hood massacre presents an opportunity to demonize a civil right he would like to abolish.
More from Gun Rights Examiners
Atlanta: Ed Stone | Austin: Howard Nemerov | Boston: Ron Bokleman | Charlotte: Paul Valone | Cheyenne: Anthony Bouchard | Chicago: Don Gwinn | Cleveland: Daniel White | DC: Mike Stollenwerk | Denver: Dan Bidstrup | Grand Rapids: Skip Coryel | Los Angeles: John Longenecker | Minneapolis: John Pierce | National: David Codrea | Phoenix: Douglas Little | Seattle: Dave Workman | St. Louis: Kurt Hofmann | Wisconsin: Gene German
And Don’t forget to visit:
For more info: Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Seattle Weekly.
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