THE LEFT'S SOLUTION: BLAME BITTER CLINGERS

Allahpundit and I are on the same wavelength here as to why the Left can't be trusted when it comes to doing something about guns.  It's difficult to get the anti-gun fanatics to face the facts about guns and mass shootings honestly.  It's especially difficult to take them seriously when loudmouths on their side are making death threats.  Remember when the Left whined about the lack of civility in our political discourse these days following the Tuscon shooting?  As we've now witnessed countless times since then, their idea of "civility" is for those who have opinions with which they disagree to sit down and shut up.

The key passage in Allahpundit's article is this:

But look. With this issue even more so than with other issues, a huge part of the stubbornness and vitriol comes from cultural divisions and suspicions about the other side’s motives, not from policy disagreements. I understand the left’s point about high-capacity magazines; banning them might very well drop the death toll at some of these horrors. It’s not crazy to think so. The best counterargument is the slippery-slope argument and I’ve never thought much of slippery-slope arguments outside the free-speech context.

The truth, though, is that I don’t trust them and find the media groupthink on this subject endlessly irritating. It takes a lot to get a New Yorker to stick up for rural America, but their disdain for “gun culture” is often transparently a function of their disdain for rural culture. The One’s condescending bitter-clinger remarks were a classic expression of it. Much of the mindless “gun control” table-pounding without specifics feels like an ostentatious way for the table-pounder to simply show how much he/she cares, especially vis-a-vis the heartless conservative. And the flailing panicky vacuousness of the Do Something!!!! response, however understandable in the aftermath of Sandy Hook shellshock, grates especially coming from the self-styled "Party of Science."

As Tim Carney noted earlier, some of Our Moral Superiors who are pounding the table for “gun control” can’t even tell you what a semiautomatic or an “assault rifle” is. They’ve shown no compunction about demagoging other mass shootings for their political ends, no matter how thin the evidence was to support their conclusions. We were presented on Friday with a very unusual, very specific fact pattern from a mass killing committed by someone with a very unusual, very specific set of mental problems, and yet the big “scientific” recommendation tonight on MSNBC was to keep an eye on your kid in case he’s shooting too many aliens on the Xbox.