Is it fair to rub their faces in a terrible mistake when they’ve already apologized?
Probably not, no. But let’s do it anyway.
At a demonstration Tuesday in Concord, New Hampshire organized by Michael Bloomberg’s advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns, participants tried to rally support for gun control by spending several hours reading aloud from a list of gun violence victims who have been killed since the Newtown shooting.
But the list from which the activists were reading — which was compiled by Slate and includes more than 6,000 names — contained at least 10 murder suspects, including the alleged cop killer Christopher Dorner, who was the subject of a massive, high-profile manhunt in February, and apparently killed himself in a cabin after a gun fight with police.
Follow the last link for a possibly-complete-possibly-not list of murderers who somehow ended up on the victim side of the ledger being kept by gun-control activists. Here’s the list at Slate featuring Dorner, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and other accused killers which Bloomberg’s group used two days ago in New Hampshire. Why would a list like that include them? Good question:
Dan Kois, an editor at Slate, explained to The Atlantic Wire why Tsarnaev was on their list — an intentional inclusion.
“The interactive is a tally of all the people who’ve been killed by guns since the Newtown shootings. So it doesn’t differentiate between good guys and bad guys. We were studiously attempting to be as clear as possible that this was not victims of gun crimes … it was everybody that’s been killed by guns since Newtown.”
Why would you keep a comprehensive list of people killed in shootings after Newtown if you’re not interested in building sympathy for them as victims? The point of the list is, or should be, to drive home the tragedy of so many innocent lives taken. If you’re going to toss non-innocents like Tsarnaev, Dorner, et al. in there, you might as well ask the Pentagon for an estimate of Al Qaeda fighters shot on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan and toss them in too. They’re all casualties of the demon device known as firearms, aren’t they? Come to think of it, didn’t Hitler shoot himself?
It’s an … interesting political project that has room for Tamerlan Tsarnaev on its roll call of the fallen but not the people he murdered because of a difference in the precise means of lethal force used. Anyway, two obvious questions. One: Did none of the imbeciles who organized the anti-gun rally in New Hampshire recognize Tsarnaev’s name before they read it aloud? These people watch the news sometimes, right? Two: If you want to make a political point about easy access to guns that involves degenerates like Tsarnaev and Chris Dorner, isn’t there a really obvious way to do it without adding them to a list of innocents?
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