"[I]t’s just another day in America with guns," complained Chris Hayes as he concluded a nearly two-minute mini-segment on his February 22 edition of All In lamenting a lack of political will to move forward on more federal gun restriction legislation.
Hayes began the segment with a clip of President Obama lecturing about the "hard truth" that "we probably lost even more Americans" than in San Bernardino "to guns this weekend alone" with "another one of our communities terrorized by gun violence."
Actually, it seems that Kalamazoo was terrorized by an evil individual who, for no discernible reason, set about to randomly kill fellow human beings. He had no criminal record nor is the early reporting indicating any history of questions regarding his mental health.
Simply put, no gun law could have prevented him from taking lives at random that night. He just as well could have fatally stabbed, bludgeoned, or run over several people with his automobile before either being captured by police or turning himself in.
You can read the transcript and watch the segment video below:
MSNBC
All In
February 22, 2016; 8:33 p.m. Eastern; 1 minute 46 secondsPresident BARACK OBAMA, earlier Monday: The attack in San Bernardino killed 14 of our fellow Americans. And here’s a hard truth: we probably lost even more Americans than that to guns this weekend alone.
On Saturday, another one of our communities was terrorized by gun violence.
CHRIS HAYES: That was the president speaking at the National Governors Association referring to gun violence over the weekend including a particularly horrifying case which took place in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Jason Brian Dalton, a 45-year-old father of two, was charged today with six counts of murder for a shooting spree that took place over six hours in Kalamazoo Saturday.
Dalton, who was moonlighting as an Uber driver, is accused of carrying out the shootings in three separate locations, leaving six people dead and two more injured. Police say the victims appear to have been chosen at random. The suspect continued to pick up passengers after the bloodshed began.
President Obama called the mayor of Kalamazoo and local law enforcement to offer federal support in the investigation.
Dalton had no criminal record and Uber said in a statement today he had passed a background check.
While authorities say they have not determined a motive right now, there does not appear to be any evidence of a connection to say ISIS or a foreign jihadi group.
The president’s remark today relating the San Bernardino massacre to shootings in the past several days point to a fundamental truth about our society and political system’s disparate levels of tolerance for violence committed by people who we view as quote the enemy or as terrorists, and the violence that Americans inflict on each other.
Think for a second about how different the reaction would be if, in fact, a social media post pledging loyalty to ISIS had been uncovered in the wake of this mass murder in Kalamazoo.
But since there is no such connection, or at least none discovered yet, it’s just another day in America with guns.
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