Yesterday, a reporter from NBC attempted to sandbag President Trump on gun control. Ali Vitali asked President Trump if he was in favor of “extreme vetting” for gun buyers after the Sutherland Springs slaughter. The CIC said the following:
If you did what you’re suggesting, there would have been no difference three days ago, and you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him, and hit him and neutralize him. And I can only say this: If he didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead. So that’s the way I feel about it. Not going to help.
Needless to say, that was a pro-gun, anti-gun control statement up with which The Washington Post could not put.
So the WaPo commissioned one of their ace propagandists at “the Fix” to fix it so that the President looks like an idiot. The result: a piece written by Aaron Blake (above) entitled Trump’s highly dubious claim that more gun control could have left ‘hundreds more dead’ in Texas.
With this claim, Trump takes a plausible premise and stretches it beyond recognition, as he so often does. The president’s penchant for hyperbole and ignoring inconvenient facts are very much present here.
First, Trump’s claim that hundreds more would have died if those two civilians who warded him off didn’t have guns is highly suspect. The largest mass shooting in U.S. history — which took place in Las Vegas last month — left 58 dead. Trump is essentially arguing that the Texas shooting would have been at least eight times more deadly and four times worse than Las Vegas, which is very speculative at best and implausible at worst.
And the fact that a U.S. president is so openly speculative about the scope of such tragedy is remarkable. Trump, mind you, isn’t suggesting this could have happened; he’s saying it would have.
I gotta say it: I agree. President Trump has shown a remarkable inability to master the facts underlying issues in general, and gun rights in specific (e.g. his erroneous and unrealized claim that he could eliminate Bush the Elder’s Gun Free School Zone Act on day one of his presidency).
Alternatively, you could call the President’s ill-informed/off-the-cuff pronouncements masterful PR for low information voters. Because who really cares if the Sutherland Springs killer could have — or would have — gone on to kill one more person or “hundreds” more? Putting the bad guy down, preventing any further loss of life, was Job One.
A job accomplished by an American with an AR-15 (who didn’t “happen to have it in his truck”).
The suggestion that federal background checks would have — sorry, could have — inhibited the Sutherland Springs hero from engaging the killer with sufficient firepower is a direct threat to the Post’s pro-background check position. Mr. Blake mounts the following rear guard action.
There is no real reason to believe the increased background checks would have prevented the armed civilians, Johnnie Langendorff and Stephen Willeford, from obtaining their own firearms that they used to engage Kelley. Background checks, after all, don’t mean no one gets guns; they just mean it’s perhaps a little more difficult to get guns — that there is more of a process involved.
Speaking of facts, it seems Mr. Blake shares President Trump’s lack of precision; only Mr. Willeford was armed. And while we’re attempting to keep in touch what’s sometimes called reality, federal background checks may make it “a little more difficult to get guns” for some people, but they make it impossible for others.
Such as Americans convicted of nonviolent felonies. prisonpolicy.org reports that “almost half a million people are locked up because of a drug offense.” Thanks to the federal background check system, millions of ex-cons convicted of nonviolent crimes can’t legally purchase or indeed keep and bear a firearm. Ever.
And don’t forget that President Trump was all for adding tens of thousands Americans on the FBI’s super-secret, unaccountable Terrorist Watch List to the federal background check’s prohibited persons list — highlighting the system’s potential for abuse.
What if Uncle Sam suddenly decided that all Americans who take anti-depressants — one in nine Americans of all ages — should be prohibited persons? One thing’s for sure: the FBI’s federal background system still wouldn’t prevent psycho killers from running amok. With guns. An idea that gun control advocates can’t seem to grasp, despite their [non-existent] best efforts.
So you can perhaps make an argument that the background checks that were already in place failed, and it’s more a matter of enforcing existing laws rather than adding new ones. But Trump takes it much further than that, suggesting such background checks might have prevented the two men from obtaining their guns in the first place, resulting in an increased death toll at the Texas church.
But he won’t concede that shored-up background checks might have impeded the gunman, for reasons that aren’t clear.
Reasonable people can disagree, but Trump is making a quite unreasonable argument here.
As I’ve pointed out above, the claim that background checks are a form of gun control is not so unreasonable — if you look at the facts. But then facts tend to confuse and anger gun control advocates. Which is why they’re dishonest at best, evil at worst.
Finally, a president with balls.
My sentiments exactly. RF gets a C-…seriously Donnie’s got a lot on his plate. He looks seriously jet-lagged too. Thank GOD the Hildebeast isn’t in office. Vetting for Muslims…
That and many of those “peaceful drug offenders” are currently doing time only for the drug offenses they were caught for, and are guilty of many more serious crimes they got away with. The prisons being full of “peaceful pot smokers” is utter liberal bullshit.
Prohibitionism is alive and well I see.
All the moonshining whiskey gangsters are still running around shooting up places too aren’t they? Oh wait…
Make any product contraband when there is still a market for it and all you’ll do is create a violent black market.
Flip the word “drugs” for “guns” and complete the following sentence:
____ are outlawed. So now several ____ cartels are in the business of running ____ all over the country. Those ____ cartels now fight for control of territory where they can sell their ____ to willing buyers.
Legalize drugs all you want. I support it. The fact of the matter is however, it won’t reduce serious crimes and most of the drug offenders in prison now, doing 3-5 for trafficking, will be back doing 10 for armed robbery or burglary after they’re out for a year. Drugs themselves aren’t much of a factor as the culture is. If you think you’re going to empty the prisons and change the nation by legalizing weed, you’re wrong. But, you will generate a ton of tax revenue for things like more police cars and the wall. So go for it.
P, that’s Hank’s point exactly. Legaize A, and the gangster culture will just move on to B and still be just as violent. Even if you legalize everything, there will still be people who want the easy money route and are willing to commit violence in its pursuit. It’s the individuals who commit the violence, not the legality (drugs) or availability (guns) of things that make them do it.
Yet another example of why thankfully we’re gonna have two terms of Trump and a stacked conservative SCOTUS.
The Left takes him literally and not seriously.
We take him seriously and not literally.
I think some of the total morons in this whole” Texas Church Nightmare”are the people in charge with the U.S.A.F.-He was charged and convicted-spent.(Army prison) 1 year and did not report him as a Felon with domestic asult conviction. which when they did his 4 background checks for the 4 guns he bought never came up.Anyone in any state with a severe assult charge, or even a restraint (No contact order) is automatically denied the privledge of a carry permit. A carry PERMIT is treated as your PERMIT to operate a motor vehicle. You take a class, written and physical and a demonstration of ability to operate safely. You can kill someone easier with a car than a gun and that happens daily. It all matters weather you shoot yourself or crash your car. Sometimes you make it and sometimes you do not. The DMV or the Sheriff can suspend or revoke any permit one may acquire for any irresponsible use or misuse. Whats the diffrence.
Surely not hundreds saved, but at least twenty. There were wounded people left in the church that he was methodically finishing off when he was engaged by the good guy with a gun. Twenty wounded people survived because of that intervention. Probably more than that. Since he appeared to be there to finish off his in-laws and they weren’t at church, they were probably saved as well.
It’s all speculation either way. We can “what if” it until the cows come home.
If you watched the interview with Mr. Willeford he said that the shooter had more guns and lots of ammo in his vehicle. The direction he headed off in was towards another small town with another baptist church full of people.
Who’s to say that after he finished the one church that he didn’t go to another and another…so, yes, it could’ve been “hundreds”.
His most violent prior acts related to his domestic situation. It’s been reported that his (ex?)in-laws attended that church, but were not there on Sunday. It stands to reason that they were his targets and that having missed them at the church, his next stop was wherever he was most likely to find them. I’d guess that would mean their home? So we’re looking at perhaps several more victims right there.
Who knows what else would have happened? Killers on the run sometimes hole up in some public location and take/shoot hostages. Did you think about that? What is abundantly obvious and beyond dispute is that a man made a decision to commit a masacre, the likes of which only ever end with suicide, homicide by police or good guy, or capture and permanent incarceration.
There is no other end game, as every spree shooter knows. These people are desperate to fill their final hours with as much mayhem as possible. What the potential body count could be is debatable, but the idea that there easily could be many more (yes, even hundreds) is irrefutable. These good guys with a gun foreclosed all of those potential scenarios when they shot and chased the killer until he crashed.
WELL JEFFERY, YOU LIKE THE REST ARE DOING NOTHING BUT NITPICKING.TRUMP WAS USING THE TERM 100S AS AN AXAMPLE. WITH ALL THE GUNS AND AMMO, OF USED EFFICENTLY IT COULD HAVE BEEN 101. YOU, LIKE MOST ARE MISSING THE POINT. LAW ABIDING PROPLE THAT HAVE CARRY PERMITS, AND OWN AR-15S ARE GREAT. IF THE SAVIOR WHO CAME TO THE RESCUE WOULD BE DEAD IF HE DID NOT HAVE AN AR-15. APPARENTLY YOU MISSED THE INTERVIEW I SAW. HE REALLY HELD BACK FOR THE LIMITED INTERVIEW HE DID FOR ABC. HE EVEN STATED SO IN THE RADIO INTERVIEW I HEARD/SAW-IT WAS DONE VIA SIMUCAST. HO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND SCRAMBLE AROUND -MABYE YOUTUBE AND SEE IF YOU CAN SEE IT-GO AT HOME AND THE RADIO INTERVIEW AT THE RADIO STATION. D
Trump making the claim that the murderer could have killed hundreds more forced the Washington Post to concede that MORE could have been killed, to then argue that hundreds of lives wouldn’t have been save, but implicit in that is that lives were saved.
Trump does this all the time. He makes a statement that is obviously an exaggeration and his opponents attack the exaggeration in a manner that almost always results in Trump’s opponents implicit agreeing with Trump’s underlying position.
He had several hundred rounds of ammunition with and or on his person. Why couldn’t he have ambushed the cops killed them all and continue murdering civilians in the hundreds???
Three years ago a terrorist on a Belgian passenger train with an AK47 and several hundred rounds was going to kill as many unarmed people as possible. But he got beaten up by three empty handed Americans.
So yes one evildoer with a rifle and plenty of ammunition can kill hundreds in one day.
Given the right size truck and a big enough crowd one driver can run over and kill hundreds of people in about 15 minutes. As they have been trying doing in Europe for a while now.
Yeah that Belgian train takedown was action movie stuff, the way I remember it that one guy rushed the shooter whose gun jammed but he slashed him across the face, but the guy still managed to start choking him out and the shooter cut off his finger but he held on…. and THEN this guy stops his own bleeding AND goes over to another guy who was shot and spurting blood and actually sticks two of his remaining fingers : ( inside the guy and stops the bleeding and saves his life UNREAL
I imagine I wouldve hid under the seat and maybe (I hope) had the balls to try and surprise him and lunge at him and who knows… I give this guy all the credit, some kind of champion!!
So maybe the new NRA mantra should be “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with a gun that jams and a badass capable of keeping a choke hold while a bad guy cuts his finger off!”… too wordy maybe… anyway, my little joke : )
Thank God for the electoral college.
Can you imagine the crap that Hitlary would have come up with in the last 6 weeks alone?
The Electoral College is the reason that this country is not called the United States of California
The electoral college are why there are enough democrats alive to matter. If they tried to grab power that blatantly, we would have strung them all up decades ago.
“If they tried to grab power that blatantly, we would have strung them all up decades ago.”
‘Stringing them up’, while visually quite viscerally gratifying, is a highly labor-intensive process.
In the interest of efficiency, the nearest concrete wall and a single round of ammunition is awfully tough to beat.
I’d like to think Ed Deming would approve… 😉
It’s still not too late for a suppressor bill or an SBS/SBR bill. With this guy in office, he could intimidate the Republicans in Congress to pass it or he’ll target them as anti gun.
And we know how badly that will make them look if their from certain parts of the country.
So what, they think the same chucklef*cks who didn’t flag the baby-skull-breaking, mental-institution-escaping waste of skin in NICS would suddenly start doing a bang-up job if we add the word “extreme”?
Wow. I popped over to the WaPo to read of few of the comments for this article. Now my head hurts.
Trump is using hyperbole to make a point to the dipshit reporter that their question was absurd and a waste of time. Then, we condemn the Tweeter In Cheif of being ridiculous and speculating that he’s completely incorrect. Far from a super pro-trump guy, I do believe that he’s not a complete moron, and he’s doing the best he can with what he’s got. I do think he thought it was going to be easier than it really is. So far, this guy is on our side. Stop poking at the little dumb things and pay attention to the bigger picture.
Agree,
Hump is despicable and dangerous, liable to provoke nuclear debacle with the bigger loon in North Korea among other things… women who disagree with Hump are “bleeding” and “fat” and “ugly”, women he desires are “bitches” and he brages about gettting away with sexual assault because hes a star… and really when he mocked the disability of the NYT reporter… these are your values… not to mention the Islamophobia and racism and general lack of competence… like Ive said many times you have to be a dumb white guy to love this guy and 71% of you white guys with high school diplomas or less voted for him and continue to support him while other dessert him…
I know today is the anniversary of the earth shattering event that was Trump’s election to the presidency and it’s a particularly painful day for you, but still, do try to relax. You’re apt to get over excited and hurt yourself.
Rob.Are you traded? Racist for sure.
I love President Trump!
He is playing 10 dimensional chess with the liberal media
They are so fixated on his tweets that he is able to get his agenda rolling
As other said abov, his use of hyperbole makes them agree with his basic position
His most recent comments have all been solidly pro-gun
If we can primary out the rhinos in the mid term elections there is still time to get reciprocity and suppressors passed in his first term
Pretty sure Middle-America understood what the President was saying.
Loud and Clear we did.
Of course they did, the problem is that middle class people who live in suburbs who work 50 hours a week, have kids to raise, parents to look in on, etc. don’t have the time to “listen to arguments” or “get to the bottom of issues” they can only think with their feelings and that’s why the nation is in the trouble it’s in.
On top of that, we have the Millennials flocking to cities for college, they’re exposed to communist liberal BS while partying on the weekends, and f’ing like rabbits. They learn nothing, can’t find jobs, and when Bernie or Hilary say stuff like 15/hr minimum wage, they support them and beat the Bolshevik drum and browbeat the bourgeoisie and have never been around or exposed to rural living and the traditions of gun ownership in America.
While the dems are down and out now, given how spineless and left leaning the Republicans are becoming, I don’t think we’re going to win this battle of ideologies. 20 years from now, I don’t see this nation looking anything like it did in the early 90’s, let alone today even.
And 40 years from now, I don’t think the US will exist anymore
I agree. There’s nothing holding us together anymore. We are clearly at least two different countries trying to occupy the same land. When there is no longer anything holding us together, all that’s left is to fight over the corpse. Which is where I think we’ll be before too much longer. I used to hope that I would die peacefully in my dotage before that came to pass, but increasingly I doubt that I will be allowed such luxury.
Or, you know, we could just admit our differences and walk away peacefully.
Cities can all become city states and have the ability to try their liberal utopia strategies and “flyover country” can get along living in peace and not have to worry about bureaucrats in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away making life and death decisions for them…
You’re talking about fighting over a corpse of a form of government that obviously doesn’t work. I would argue doesn’t work at all in the long run, but even if one disagrees with that it’s obvious that it doesn’t work when scaled up to a country with a landmass as large as ours and a population as large as ours.
Time to break apart and go our own way. No need for bloodshed.
Yall are donkeys who know nothing about US history beyond loony Beck lessons and general American Exceptionalism indoctrination on am radio, the US has experience many periods of extreme political division from Federalists/Democratic Republicans to Democrats/Whigs/Free Soil to Democrats/Rupublics to the Civil War to Reconstruction to Republicans/Populists to the Depression to the 60s to Reagan to a Black in the White House and on and on… you are too ignorant to be real
It’s so stupid that the liberal’s if-it-saves-just-one-life standard for gun control suddenly falls short when applied against gun control. If against gun control the standard is to save “hundreds” literally or else it’s “speculative ” and “implausible “.
Did any of you see the aerial photos of whack job’s parents’ house? Huge house with swimming pool and remodeled barn where whack job lived. The picture is remarkably like Newtown. Dad was in USAF and whack job goes into USAF where dad probably sent him to get him into some structure. Didn’t work because he was crazy well before that. Multiple charges, sentences, plea bargains, time in the funny farm, and both mental health and law enforcement in military and civilian world fail to do their jobs. Ho.w many times have we heard this before. Next thing we will find out is that parents covered for him since age 14, just like in Newtown. It is always the same story. Meanwhile, NYT, which actually got all of this right, also obsessed about the red dot and the 2 stage trigger on the AR “after market accessories both of which made it easier to acquire and shoot his targets.” We see where the MSM wants to take this.
Looks like Dems are sweeping Virginia. Good news
Soon it will be Arizona, then North Carolina, and after that Texas itself. The only hope we have is states like Pennslyvania and Michigan can be turned because without them, I don’t see how any conservative after Trump will win.
Yeah, no. Demographically this country is screwed without serious reform, which won’t happen, because the Left depends on illegal immigrants and handouts for support. Legal immigrants and people who work for a living don’t support the left. The gravy train will grind to a halt and people can only stomach so much bs before the system crumbles. I don’t see the US being around long enough to worry about Democrats running the show unless this country gets its shit together.
Who cares if our side gets overrun by paste-eaters, the cockroaches will inherit a kingdom of ash if they don’t grow up.
you can thank muh true conservative #NeverTrumpers for running a pointedly stupid campaign.
Nobody wants Bush or McCain or any of those RINO cucks anymore, and the GOPe will continue to lose until they learn that.
Or perhaps that is the objective.
Wow, the Democrat got half the margin of victory predicted by the polling.
If it’s one more person dead or 20K what’s the difference?
Isn’t the rallying call of the anti-gunners “If it saves one life”?
Hil orally Clit on would already have “them” knocking down doors. Trump’s right, their wrong, fuck you WaPo
Masterful, and successful misdirection by making this about background checks. The reporter did not ask about background checks, nor did the president respond about background checks. The question was about “extreme vetting” and so was the response.
Any reasonable person who has viewed the president’s proposals on extreme vetting would know that he is talking about reviews of social media, reviews of banking records, reviews of education, reviews of political writings, interviews with family members and friends, etc.
That is far, far beyond the current background system, and would certainly bog the system down so much that lawful and rightful firearms owners would be denied. The president was 100% accurate.
This is yet another example of the media not being able to respond intelligently to what the president actually said, so they have to make up something he did not say and argue against that instead.
“This is yet another example of the media not being able to respond intelligently to what the president actually said, so they have to make up something he did not say and argue against that instead.”
Yup.
Before the election, a reporter realized that and wrote an article on the game Trump was playing on the media.
It’s well worth the read :
“The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/
I think that is quite salient. But I don’t think Trump was responded with irony to the attempted irony by the reporter who used the “extreme vetting” snidely. Trump was simply being honest and accurate. This is apparently a rural area, the shooter could have escaped with NO witnesses to his truck description and hit a second or third church or gathering quite easily.
And the reporter was attempting to equate military age males from places like Syria to US males. They were asserting that everyone needs “extreme vetting.” In hindsight there are a dozen ways one could turn the reporter’s snide and prepared attempt to ambush Trump:
Trump could have responded by saying:
“Are you asking should there be extreme vetting before anyone convicted of a violent crime, as is the case here, is let out of prison, which is about 90% of US murder, bi it with knives, beatings, guns or strangulation? No. but we should go for much longer mandatory minimum sentences, including in the military.”
What is less relevant then the Washington Post???
Universal background checks are national gun registration rebranded, nothing more and nothing less.
It’s a pity people like Stephen Willeford will never truly be rewarded or recognized by our current society for their upstanding ethics and personal sacrifice.
Be born a man and one day claim to be woman and you get praised by the media and get put on the cover of a magazine for “bravery”. Run out barefoot of your home putting your life on the line for your community, family, and friends to respond to an armed attacker and your deeds will get watered down and politicized by corrupt politicians and no one will remember you after a week because all the focus will be on the tools you used rather than the actions you took.
Sad times.
politicians promoting more gun control are ignoring the fact that the USAF didn’t comply with existing laws, which required them to put the perp’s domestic violence conviction in the federal database, making him prohibited.
Goodness, aren’t these the same people that have an apoplectic fit if someone suggests a voters identify themselves? It just shows many people don’t have principles, just positions of convenience.
Wonder how much pride was swallowed to write this article? Regardless, I have to give Farago props for even touching it when I honestly did not think he would.
“he could eliminate Bush the Elder’s Gun Free School Zone Act on day one of his presidency).“
Ummmm no? The Gun Free School Zone Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by the president; To repeal now, requires another bill to pass through both houses of Congress . He can no more eliminate that then he could Obamacare.