In the Wake of the Aurora Shooting

My thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of those killed and injured in Aurora, Colorado. I can’t begin to imagine their pain.

A horrific crime was perpetrated against innocent Americans in the wee hours Friday morning, as “alleged” criminal James Holmes went into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises theater in Aurora, Colorado. Dressed as The Joker, the 24-year old unemployed student Holmes reportedly set off smoke bombs, and then proceeded to shoot up theater number 9, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more.

However, in typical liberal fashion, Bill Moyers of PBS fame has placed blame for this crime not with the man who actually carried out this horrific act. Instead, in typical liberal fashion, Moyers deflected responsibility of this horrific act upon those with whom he disagrees.

NRA President Wayne LaPierre, the NRA itself, responsible firearm owners, and American history - including slavery - are apparently responsible for the dead and injured in Colorado, not James Holmes.

Yes that’s right… this new 21st century definition of racism, again, has come out to play. Slavery was abolished in the middle of the 19th century, yet today is still a card being played by the left to somehow deflect blame away from those truly accountable and place it upon those liberals see more fit to ‘deserve’ said blame.

It doesn’t appear Moyers rant is available as an embedded video, so I’ll link to it here. You can read the transcript here, at a website called “The Moderate Voice.” To read the transcript is beneficial, because through vocal inflection alone Moyers has the ability to persuade. That’s what opinion media-types do.

By mentioning that LaPierre gave speeches just before both events transpired, Moyers begins his rant by creating a false link between the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech and this recent crime in Aurora. He quickly turns and calls this “just coincidental and unfortunate” but the theme is created and the tone is set, and Moyers is ready to move on to more important things.

Important to Moyers, apparently, is being sure to lay out the fact that there are an estimated 300 million guns in America, and of course most of them are owned by the most evil of evil beings: men. With those 300 million guns came an approximate 30K deaths and an approximate 300K gun-related assaults (Moyers offers no citation, but I’ll take his word). Moyers also says there is an estimated cost of approximately $100 billion per year; yet again no sources are cited. Again, I’ll take his word.

There are approximately the same number of automobiles in America (250K), and approximately 30K fatalities per year as a result of the use of those vehicles. Should we outlaw cars and trucks? After all, the use of a firearm is predominately with the intent to harm or kill, whereas vehicles are used for transportation and almost never as a weapon. So firearms are doing what they’re designed to do, and cars are killing people when they’re only supposed to take people from point A to point B. Doesn’t this essentially make vehicles more deadly?

Next, the heart=strings are pulled with this classic:

“Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns than guns,”

The purpose of a firearm is not entertainment of a child; it is the harm or killing of a live being. There is a reason it is called a weapon. There is zero ambiguity here. The very idea of comparing the regulation of these two entities is beyond stupid. Guns, within their own physical existence, are probably statistically safer than toys. That is the only way a reasonable comparison might be made between toys and firearms.

It is the criminal and irresponsible use, maintenance, and / or ownership of firearms that causes problems. Harm or death is never brought by a weapon itself. To say otherwise reeks of ignorance, period.

Moyers next discusses violence being “[…] Our alter ego, wired into our stone-aged brains, so intrinsic its toxic eruptions no longer shock, except momentarily when we hear of a mass shooting like this latest in Colorado.”

Yet Mr. Moyers fails pathetically here to discuss how liberal Hollywood has, over time, eroded and semblance of morals and values in American culture. Hollywood produces violent images at a rate that is incomprehensible, if not irresponsible. Yet we conservatives understand that responsibility demands a few things from us as individuals in order to maintain our free society; teaching children that what they see on TV is not real unless it is literally a news show, and that cable boxes and game consoles have rating systems that allow adults to lock children out of that which is not for their consumption.

It’s kind of like food, Mayor Bloomberg and Mrs. Obama, but I digress.

It is easier for liberals to blame the NRA and guns, make fun of Ward and June, Wally and The Beav, while mocking conservatives who “want to take us back to the days of white picket fences,” rather than address the sickness that is Hollywood and its leading role in the destruction of any moral compass left in our society.

The very company that produced “The Dark Knight Rises” also had a trailer for a not-yet-released movie called “Gangster Squad” playing in theaters nationwide. That trailer just happens to depict, according to Deadline Hollywood, “an upcoming [pic] set in 1949 about a ruthless Mafia Godfather who runs Los Angeles. One of the scenes in the trailer that’s been playing all morning [today] shows a gangster with a machine gun shooting up people in a movie theater from behind the big screen.”

While we’re at it, may we also discuss violence and moral decay as embodied and embellished by rap music? You’ll never hear The Beatles, Pearl Jam, or any country artist discussing how cool it is to participate in a drive-by shooting, or how they like to call a woman “bitch” and treat her as a lesser being. Yet there is an entire subculture in entertainment that makes a very bounteous income from presenting exactly that lifestyle and behavior as not only acceptable, but glamorous.

But our President is Black, and he hangs with entertainment people. Watch what you say… and please, ignore his White half. Obama's White ancestors (his mother and grandparents) were the Marxist loving Socialists (read his book if you don’t believe me), and those words are now code for something that means I’m a racist.

And now would be a bad time for Moyers to disparage Hollywood, while we’re in the midst of the Hollywood presidency, with the American-Idol-in-Chief whining and dining with Hollywood liberal elites and scooping up the cash as fast as he can.

Remember, as our President once said,

“it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Thanks for being the president of all Americans, Mr. Obama. But I digress.


And in no way do I associate our President with any acts of violence. Let me be clear.


Ah, slavery. Apparently, according to Moyers, America “began with the forced subjugation into slavery of millions of Africans and the reliance on arms against Native Americans for its westward expansion.” No need to remember that we have long since become a civilized nation, when there’s racism to be used to promote an agenda. That, and the fact that were it not for firearms America might never have even been created. America was created in the defense of individual liberties and freedom of man from an oppressive government. You know, the kind of government that believes it can take away from you your very right to defend yourself.

Next, the Gabby Giffords reference. After that criminal act by Jared Loughner, Moyers says, “In Arizona last year, just days after the Gabby Giffords shooting, sales of the weapon used in the slaughter – a 9 millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol – doubled.”

Yes, Mr. Moyers, that criminal act may indeed have lead many Arizonans to purchase firearms. And given the nature of the political discussion at the time, it made perfect sense. After all, completely innocent bystanders like Sarah Palin were being accused of murder by pundits and politicians on the left, so who knew what a Democrat president and Democrat controlled Congress might try. Americans believe in their rights, and one of those is the right to defend oneself.

Moyers next makes a lame attempt to equivocate regarding The Second Amendment’s Militia clause. This is something liberals constantly fall back on, in the effort to take away from original intent. As James Madison once said, “Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

That, friends, is original intent… not this “Well, we don’t have government sponsored militias anymore” argument I’ve heard from the likes of Chris Matthews and other drum-beaters of the left.

In a sad closing effort, Moyers tries to put weapons in the hands of radical Islamic terrorists, in the effort to once again pull the strings of bleeding hearts across America. The infamous American jihadist Adam Gahahn was once recorded (and can be seen on YouTube) discussing the ease with which a person may purchase a firearm in America.

Firearms are readily available in Arab and predominately Muslim nations in the Middle East too, although through very different means. Those firearms are not a topic for such discussions by the likes of Moyers, and I for one wonder why. Perhaps it is because those firearms were in the hands of the rebels, which led to the overthrow of tyrannical dictators? Of course, we don’t want to discuss the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is the likely benefactor of such upheaval, because President Obama early and often spoke out in favor of this al Qaeda born fundamentalist movement. Again, I digress.

Even perhaps the most famous pacifist, Mahatma Gandhi, understood the importance of a person’s right to defend himself. In his autobiography he stated, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

There can and should be reasonable discussions about how easily attainable firearms may be. If weapons can be had by criminals through the same means as law-abiding citizens, that is a problem. All indications are that James Holmes obtained his weapons of choice legally.

I am reasonable enough to understand that there are some weapons that need not be manufactured and sold to the general public. However, I would always argue on behalf of the public being able to have those weapons, over the complete restriction of such. If there is one thing that always must be understood, it is that The Bill of Rights was created for very specific reasons, with a very specific purpose; those are our most important rights as given by our Creator, and they must be protected across the nation under any and all circumstances.

In closing, more strict laws are not the answer. According to cnsnews.com:

Currently in Aurora, Colorado, where the shooting took place, it is already unlawful to carry a concealed "dangerous weapon," discharge firearms, unless by law enforcement on duty or on shooting range, and have loaded firearm in motor vehicle.

However, had one law abiding citizen “broken the law” and carried a firearm into that theater, some might have been spared. But as always, it is not the responsible firearm owners who cause the problems.