Death by Rhetoric

First off, I have links to all my statements so you can analyze the underlying data yourself.

In case, you've been watching the news and you are able to maintain some emotional distance from the events, I wanted to point out that my wife knew the cop who was killed at Planned Parenthood. You can read about him here. The first thing that I thought when my wife said she knew Garrett Swasey is how close to home this tragedy struck.  While statistically, you may be in little danger of being gunned down, you will probably know someone.  I mean, assuming nothing changes.  There may be good news on that front, but even as people move towards positive change, there's a group that is standing in the doorway, and blocking up the hall: the GOP.

This story refutes so many GOP truisms, that I don't even know where to begin.  Good guys with guns get killed unnecessarily by bad guys with guns- that's because guns democratize violence.  You can be a horrific killer without a lot of training.  Here's one simple fact for anyone opposed to common-sense gun-legislation: the fewer guns in a country, the fewer gun related-deaths.  Now, if you really want a gun that bad, you should be willing to jump through a few hoops.  In KY they have made it harder to get a drivers license since when I was 16, and the teenagers continue to get their licenses, but there has been a significant drop in traffic fatalities.

But even before we tackle legislation, we need to change the tone politically, and that can happen as soon as people demand it. If it seems unfair to put this on the shoulders of the GOP, I'm using their own standards.  Not a day goes by where a Republican doesn't tell moderate Islam to rein in their extremists.  How well do they follow their own advice?  Do you get a feeling that they are reining in the right wing extremists, or are they fanning the flames of their hatred?  When "moderates" like Jeb Bush say that we should only allow Syrian refugees if they are Christian, they are espousing bigotry.  But they are also espousing stupidity.  People are not dying on a daily basis in our country because of Muslim extremists.  They are dying because of crazy white guys with guns. The irony here is that white Christians often end up in the crossfire.  A smart bigot would want to focus on the more pressing danger of angry white guys with guns.

Terrorism is in the news constantly. You'd think that jihadists were pounding on our back-doors daily, but if you compare gun-deaths to Americans killed by jihadists (or Muslim extremists), you see that the gun deaths are much more pressing danger.  And ever since 9/11 we've found domestic terrorism is the bigger threat. Yet we as a country continue to empty our pockets to chase down every jihadist. Where is the sense of proportion and risk management?

Terrorism is a tactic.  It is used by weaker players, against more powerful ones.  The whole purpose is to get the powerful players to overreact.  If you can make the strong man afraid of his own shadow, you win, but it only ever works when the strong man plays along and subscribes to irrational fears.  Right-wing extremists are trying to intimidate people they disagree with using violence, but we don't have to let them.  And we don't have to tolerate people and politicians who give safe harbor to such terrorists with their inflammatory rhetoric.