Scott Gillespie And The Catechism Of Uselessness

Scott Gillespie of the Strib editorialized about the one-year anniversary of Sandy Hook.

At least he ended the piece constructively:

Those 26 faces will stay frozen, though. The children and their teachers, lost forever except in photos and home video. At least — if you believe it will help — say another prayer for them and their families. If we offer nothing else, at least say a prayer.

Other than that?  Gillespie foreshadows what will, I suspect, be the anti-rights movement’s two big hooks in Minnesota this year; guilt, and the vague need to “do something”, even if the “something” is completely useless at preventing actual crime, with both of them always, always, wrapped in the memory of people who would not have been saved by anything that they’re proposing.

But practical responses aren’t the issue, here.  This is about emotions:

You see those faces frozen in time on your TV screen now. They are angels, every one of them. You would like to look away, turn the channel and move on. Our Congress did, and most of our state legislatures. One year later, little has changed.

It’s not the Sandy Hook kids’ faults the were all white and upper-middle-class, and that the media focused on them and not the many, many more children slaughtered in ones and twos in Barack Obama’s Chicago – who are almost entirely black.  But it is Scott Gillespie’s fault that he ignores, or doesn’t know, that not a single law proposed in any state legislature, or in Congress, would have prevented Sandy Hook – but that the City of Chicago has “done something”, a near complete civilian gun ban, that is closely correlated with a skyrocketing murder rate in Chicago.

But those kids are black, and in a Democrat stronghold.  As always, they go unmentioned.

The emotions that Gillespie – and the anti-rights movement whose water he’s carrying – aren’t just about sympathy.  No, there’s gotta be ninety seconds of hate: 

Wayne LaPierre is on the screen now. You can hear the anger in his voice. If he feels any pain, any regret, he hides it. The perfect man for the job. Raise more money and spread more lies. Intimidate. Bully. Threaten. Win at all costs, from coast to coast. Not undefeated, but close.

Scott Gillespie, I hereby challenge you; where was LaPierre wrong?  What are the “lies?”  Let’s talk about that.  Preferably face to face, but I’ll do email.  Let’s hash this out.

No, it’s not that LaPierre lied; he didn’t, and doesn’t have to.  He was right.  His opponents were wrong.  And they – in this case Gillespie, but it could be any lefty columnist – are attacking LaPierre with the dim ad-homina and the scurrilous accusation – the “lies” – because it’s all they have, and a boogeyman, a Goldstein, is what they need.

And then there’s the murderer. We should ignore him and his story, right? Make him as abstract as possible because it’s too hard to answer the why question without that research. There are more like him, but how could we possibly know how to find or stop them? So we move on, trying not to say his name.

Now Gillespie is just making things up.   This is where LaPierre – and all of us on the human rights side of this battle – have been focusing; Adam Lanza.  The current system worked, in that it denied him a gun.  He killed his mother – already illegal in fifty states – to steal her legally-purchased firearms to use in the rampage.

And it’s on the crazies, like him, James Holmes, Harris and Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho and the like, that Wayne LaPierre – and, incidentally, all of the rest of us on the human rights side of the argument – are focused.

And not a one of them would have been affected by any of the laws that were passed in places like Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania or California.

So when Gillespie plaintively asks…:

The anniversary show is over now. Will there be another one next year, or the year after that? Why wallow, right? We are Americans. We press on. We buck up and never look back. Like LaPierre.

…the answer is “maybe, but nothing you’re proposing would change a thing”.

But Gillespie is part of a wave of mainstream media that are working to pave the way for the anti-gun movement’s next big campaign in Minnesota.

More – much more – in coming days and weeks.