Pizza and Guns

An Ordinary Weekend:  During the 2016 election conspiracy theorists together with various alt right media outlets pushed the story that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, who was then her campaign chairman, were running a pedophile ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a popular Washington DC area pizza parlor. What became known as the Pizzagate story was ludicrous, yet some people bought into it, one of those people, a 28 year old white man, showed up with an AR 15 style rifle to “free the kids” that he truly believed were being held in dungeons in the restaurant’s basement.  Fortunately he was stopped by law enforcement before he killed anyone, sadly as we learned this weekend the police can’t always stop killers before they act.  Anyone who thinks that this weekend’s shootings, particularly the one in El Paso Texas can’t be tied to Trump’s hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric need only look to the Pizzagate incident, words have consequences and when they repeatedly come out of the mouth of the president of the United States, they are frighteningly influential.  As to this weekend’s tragedies, for those who missed it, on Saturday at least 20 people were killed while shopping in an El Paso Walmart by an anti-immigrant, white, twenty-one year old shooter with an automatic weapon.  We know for certain that the shooter despised immigrants, admired Trump and was motivated by “concerns” that the country was becoming increasingly “brown” because of the hate-filled diatribe that he posted on a fringe website shortly before he went on his murderous rampage. That website, a favorite of white supremacists and other haters,  has now been kicked off of Cloudflare, its web host, something that should have happened long ago.   Notably El Paso, which is in the district that Beto O’Rourke used to represent before he decided to seek higher office, is a very diverse border city with a very low crime rate.  The dead and wounded included at least two Mexicans who had legally crossed the border to shop, something that people do daily in El Paso.  Sadly the crowds were even larger than usual Saturday because of a pre-school year tax free shopping event.  Texas is an open carry state but despite all those assertions that mass murderers would get stopped in their tracks if only more people carried guns, even though a lot of those so called “good people” shopping in Walmart where guns are sold were carrying guns it fell to the police to stop the shooter.  Notably law enforcement was concerned that their task would have been further complicated had any of those “good people” started shooting so it’s a good thing that none of them did.  The killer, who was captured, is now talking up a hateful storm to law enforcement.  As people were still learning the fate of their loved ones in El Paso, another murderous rampage took place late Saturday night in Dayton, Ohio after another one of those white guys in his twenties with an automatic rifle shot up a bunch of people in the city’s entertainment district, killing nine of them.  That rampage was stopped almost immediately by the police who were out in force because that’s what they do on Saturday nights in the entertainment district. Though the majority of the dead and wounded were Black, it’s not yet clear what motivated the Dayton shooter and it’s not clear that we will ever know for sure since he is now dead as is his sister who he also shot during his rampage.

Reactions:  All of the Democratic candidates running for president took to the airwaves to express their condolences to the families of the victims and to reiterate their positions on the need for more gun control legislation.  Though some were careful not to say that Trump was directly responsible for the El Paso murder spree, they all tied the event to his hateful rhetoric with some like Beto O’Rourke, who cancelled several campaign events to rush home to his family and former constituents in El Paso, calling Trump out as a White nationalist, saying that “the things  he has said both as a candidate and then as the president of the United States, this cannot be open for debate.” Senator Corey Booker added “I think, at the end of the day, especially because this was a white supremacist manifesto that I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this. He is responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry.” A more measured yet appropriately fed up Senator Amy Klobuchar specifically highlighted the gun control legislation that she and a number of her colleagues in the Senate have been trying to pass, forms of which have already passed in the House, pointing out that Majority Leader McConnell refuses to even bring gun legislation to the floor of the Senate. Like other Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, she called for McConnell to call the Senate back from its August break to immediately consider gun control legislation. Moscow Mitch, also known as NRA Mitch, who fell over the weekend and is now recuperating at home from a broken shoulder, is likely to ignore all the calls for action for as long as he can.  Although a few, Republicans, most notably George P Bush, Texas’ Land Commissioner, Jeb Bush’s son whose mother is from Mexico and Ted Cruz who is of Hispanic descent denounced the racial motivation of the El Paso shooting with Bush calling it white terrorism, most Republicans who could get away with it either stayed out of the fray or offered up some of those “thoughts and prayers.”  Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney who couldn’t avoid commenting instead threw shade at the Democratic presidential candidates for using the killings as a campaign opportunity, as did the increasingly irrelevant Kellyanne Conway, adding that blaming Trump’s rhetoric was like blaming Bernie for the baseball game shooting of Steve Scalise and he would never do that, though bringing it up this weekend was incredibly useful.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in blaming the killing sprees on violent video games and mental health problems ignoring that other countries also have video games and people with mental health problems but with fewer guns have fewer mass murders because whenever white guys use automatic weapons to kill people, its their mental state not the guns or their advocacy of white supremacism that is the problem.  Neither of them mentioned that the Republican party is suing to overturn Obamacare, a strategy that would essentially defund mental health care for millions of people.  And then there is that whole praying thing, at least one Republican politician suggested that if we prayed harder there would be fewer killings.  The FBI appears to be taking the white nationalist/supremacist problem, whatever you want to call it, more seriously too.  FBI Director Wray who discussed his concerns about the issue last week has ordered FBI offices around the country to do a new threat assessment in the wake of El Paso and Dayton.   Trump who just a month ago laughed when one of his supporters at a Florida Panhandle rally suggested that shooting migrants was a good way to handle the immigrant problem, issued the requisite “thoughts and prayer” tweets, played lots of golf and crashed a wedding at his New Jersey golf retreat.  On his way back to Washington DC he ignored questions about white supremacism instead uttering some of his usual nonsensical words saying that “a lot of things are happening,” that all the first responders in Dayton and El Paso were “incredible people doing incredible jobs” and that we have to do something about hate, and by that he probably didn’t mean impeach, an option now favored by more than half of the Democrats in Congress, and/or vote him out, though those two options remain viable possibilities.  He promised to make a statement later this morning and is already tweeting out support for some kind of watered down gun control legislation, of course tying it to immigration reform that he knows will never pass. 

Other News:  It’s hard to believe that just last week the focus was on Trump’s nomination of the ill-suited and totally unqualified Congressman Ratcliffe as the new Director of National Intelligence.  Trump pulled the Ratcliffe nomination on Friday, first blaming his decision to withdraw Ratcliffe from consideration on the nasty false stories published by the “lamestream media” only to then admit that he doesn’t bother vetting candidates, he relies on the press to do it for him, because that’s a more cost effective alternative.   Later today still another Texas Republican Ken Marchant is expected to announce that he will not be seeking reelection, his increasingly purple district is now considered up for grabs.  That brings the count of Texas Republicans calling it quits up to four. North Korea is still testing missiles, Iran is still grabbing ships and Trump pulled the US out of a nuclear treaty with the Russians, albeit one that they routinely violated, because it’s easy to pull out of agreements than make them better.