Via the Free Beacon, you didn’t expect better from him on such a solemn occasion, did you? Rahm Emanuel exposed Obama’s approach to calamity within the first three weeks of his presidency. If he had gone to Orlando today and talked only about national healing, that would have been the surprise, not this.

A choice quote:

“Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons, should meet these families and explain why that makes sense….Why is it they think our liberty requires these repeated tragedies? That’s not the meaning of liberty.”

David Harsanyi notes that Obama would never apply that logic, that the law-abiding should answer for the sins of those who break the law, to, say, Muslim-Americans. I had a different thought: If we can deter some mass-casualty attacks by limiting basic rights, why shouldn’t we criminalize blasphemy? If the editors of Charlie Hebdo were barred from satirizing Mohammed, they might well be alive today. A narrow blasphemy law, prohibiting insults to “the prophet” but to no one else, is arguably a smaller affront to the First Amendment than banning a broad class of popular “assault weapons” would be to the Second, and it would undoubtedly save lives by denying jihadis a pretext to go batsh*t. I think O would dismiss that idea out of hand. But who knows anymore. This is the same guy who stood up in front of the UN and said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” a quote so dubious that Snopes had to publish an item for skeptical readers confirming that, yes, this tool actually uttered those words.

I keep hoping against hope that he’s finally going to go full YOLO, drop the pretense that it’s “assault weapons” he’s specially interested in, and call outright for full confiscation of guns. That’s what he and the left want, palpably; he has seven months left as president so he’ll pay no price politically for doing it (although Hillary will). He’s reduced here to arguing, with no obvious basis in fact, that the children of Sandy Hook would be alive and in fifth grade now if only the degenerate who murdered them hadn’t had an assault weapon. If he’d used a pair of semiautomatic pistols instead, they would have survived? Of course not, but the “assault weapons” preoccupation is and has always been just a way to get a foot in the door culturally en route to banning all semiautomatics. I’d say there’s a nonzero chance once the election’s over that Obama will come clean about his heart’s fondest desire in that regard. It’ll trigger the mother of all surges in demand for guns coast-to-coast, but that reality has never stopped him from posturing on this subject before. They don’t call him the world’s greatest gun salesman for nothing. A plea for total confiscation would be the icing on the cake.