In a stunning attempt to shift blame for Sunday’s deadly shooting at a Waffle House in Tennessee away from the mentally unstable criminal who perpetrated the crime, on Monday, an MSNBC panel claimed that gun he used, an AR-15 rifle, was the “real criminal” and that America’s pro-gun culture was also responsible for the killings.
“What is your message, I guess I want to ask, to those who say, ‘Don’t touch my guns no matter what’?,” anchor Stephanie Ruhle fretted to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens early in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour. Seizing on the opportunity to immediately exploit the tragedy to push the gun control agenda, Stephens proclaimed: “Well, that’s exactly it. The problem that we have is that we have not just a legal regime, but a culture in which the way in which guns are treated as sort of ordinary household implements is precisely what leads to the deaths of the sort we just saw in Waffle House.”
The faux conservative op/ed writer, who recently called for the repeal of the Second Amendment, reiterated: “But this, again, the central problem that we have here is that we have too many guns in this country and people who don’t think that they are dangerous....it’s also a kind of a failure of culture...”
Minutes later, left-wing Princeton professor and frequent MSNBC pundit Eddie Glaude, chimed in by falsely claiming that shooter Travis Reinking’s choice of firearm allowed him to kill more people:
An AR-15, four people are dead. And the quickness with which that happened is important....I think it’s important for us to say this, that if he [the shooter] didn’t have an AR-15, right, he wouldn’t have been able to kill four people so quickly, in my view. If he didn’t have an AR-15, right, the opportunity to kill even – to cause even more carnage may not have even been possible.
In reality, Reinking could have shot just as many people just as quickly with a semiautomatic pistol.
Glaude proceeded with his fact-free rant by actually blaming the inanimate object itself for the murders:
We want to understand it. This case crystalizes for us everything we find wrong with the current gun control debate, right? And we can say here, we can sit here and say that [shooter Travis] Reinking was mentally unstable or is mentally unstable. We can say that. And we can let people make – draw their conclusions between kind of mental health issues and gun violence. But we don’t want to do that, what we want to say is that there was an AR-15, a weapon of mass destruction, in a Waffle House....the real criminal here is that AR-15.
The glaring ignorance of basic facts about guns was only dwarfed by that seeming call for the prosecution of a firearm. It’s just another day on MSNBC.
Here is a transcript of portions of the April 23 exchange:
9:06 AM ET
(...)
STEPHANIE RUHLE: What do you make of this? What is your message, I guess I want to ask, to those who say, “Don’t touch my guns no matter what”?
BRET STEPHENS [NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST]: Well, that’s exactly it. The problem that we have is that we have not just a legal regime, but a culture in which the way in which guns are treated as sort of ordinary household implements is precisely what leads to the deaths of the sort we just saw in Waffle House. I mean, I’m waiting for the NRA to come up with its rebuttal to what happened here. I think it’s gonna be, “Guns don’t kill people, nudists kill people.” And we’re going to have an NRA campaign against – against crazed nudists.
But this, again, the central problem that we have here is that we have too many guns in this country and people who don’t think that they are dangerous, that they’re extremely dangerous and they have to be handles with caution. The idea that the father would return it to his sons is a failure of parenting on a massive level. But it’s also a kind of a failure of culture that he would not stop to think that this is dangerous to do.
(...)
9:11 AM
RUHLE: Eddie, let’s take a minute to acknowledge James Shaw. This is the hero in all of this. If he had not acted, more people would be dead. And let’s remember, he acted – it wasn’t just a regular old gun, it was an AR-15. And he got out of the bathroom and attacked a guy with a semiautomatic weapon, that’s a hero.
EDDIE GLAUDE [PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR]: I mean, indeed, and let’s be clear, we don’t have a sense, at least I don’t have a sense, of the time frame here. An AR-15, four people are dead. And the quickness with which that happened is important. So we have to put James Shaw’s actions in context, right? The guy took advantage of an opportunity. He heard a pause and he literally disarmed this man and saved lives, right?
RUHLE: He could have just hidden and saved his own life.
GLAUDE: He could have just stayed in the bathroom, and he saved lives. But I think it’s important for us to say this, that if he [the shooter] didn’t have an AR-15, right, he wouldn’t have been able to kill four people so quickly, in my view. If he didn’t have an AR-15, right, the opportunity to kill even – to cause even more carnage may not have even been possible. More people could have had an opportunity to be heroic in this instance.
We want to understand it. This case crystalizes for us everything we find wrong with the current gun control debate, right? And we can say here, we can sit here and say that [shooter Travis] Reinking was mentally unstable or is mentally unstable. We can say that. And we can let people make – draw their conclusions between kind of mental health issues and gun violence. But we don’t want to do that, what we want to say is that there was an AR-15, a weapon of mass destruction, in a Waffle House that required James Shaw to be extraordinary in a moment, in order to save lives. But the real criminal here is that AR-15.
STEPHENS: Well, and James Shaw was not only heroic in this instance, but he was going up against a whole culture that says even mentally ill or seriously unwell individuals have a constitutional right to own a weapon that can cause this kind of – these kinds of casualties this quickly.
RUHLE: Pointing to the real criminal being those who gave access to a mentally ill person, to an AR-15. It’s crazy.
(...)
