Friday, June 24, 2016

Living in Their Own Private I Don't Know

The reality-based community is determined to react to the jihadi attack in Orlando as a gun control issue. Behold the tenuous grasp of reality.

Point one on the attacker, Mateen (whose murder spree prompted Congressional sleepovers in the Capitol Building--which even a liberal publication thinks is fairly bold in that it is pretending to be a civil rights sit-in even as it attempts to undermine 5th Amendment rights to eliminate 2nd Amendment rights):

Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. Those who seek to profit from our deaths hope we will forget who our real enemy is, and blame Muslim communities instead.

That was from Black Lives Matter. As the author of that piece responds:

In case you didn’t notice, Omar Mateen, an Afghani-American radical gay Muslim registered as a Democrat, was really a right-wing, gay-hating, white conservative. No, Black Lives Matter isn’t crazy at all. Why would you say so?

They aren't based on reality. That aren't even near reality.

Starting from the wrong facts, is it any wonder that moving on to addressing gun control as the solution is so pointless?

Most Americans believe America is submerged beneath a tidal wave of gun violence. A Pew Research poll in 2013 found that 56 percent of Americans thought gun violence had risen in the last 20 years, 26 percent thought it had remained the same, and only 12 percent thought it had fallen. You might be surprised to learn the 12 percent were right.

This decline has taken place despite the expiration (in 2004) of the so-called "assault weapon" ban. And the decline extends to deaths by rifles in recent years, according to that author.

Yet some of our so-called leaders in Congress are throwing a tantrum to vote on things that would have had no effect had they been in place prior to Orlando.

In an age of Google, you have to be very determined to ignore reality. Yet here we are.

By all means, you are free to fight gun ownership rights, patriarchy, homophobia, and supremacy of any sort. Heck, rail against gravity for all I care. Have a freaking ball. It's a free country. (Although you'd have a more target-rich environment fighting those things in a whole bunch of Moslem-majority countries, truth be told.).

But don't pretend those fights have anything to do with preventing the Islamist hatred that led to the Orlando attack and many other atrocities here and around the world where jihadis and their Islamist ideology--not all or even the majority of Moslem communities, as the BLM fools think they are defending--are not contained and defeated.

But that reality is too inconvenient to confront, apparently.

Tips to Instapundit.