One of my consistently-Trumpiod friends from high school posted this on Facebook.
There are two big lies here, one explicit and one implied.
The explicit big lie is that this event was not reported by the “liberal mainstream media” – a favorite poor-me, oh-we’re-so-oppressed right-wing trope. A Google search that took me less than three seconds quickly reveals the lie, with three of the first four links being from the hardly conservative outlets BBC, CBS News, and the Washington Post (and the fourth being from the Associated Press, which might qualify as “liberal mainstream media” since it prints facts).
The implicit lie is that “gun control will make us less safe because good guys with guns won’t be able to kill bad guys with guns” – another standard right-wing belief. But the reason that this incident stands out so sharply is that this scenario is fleetingly rare. Indeed, the glee with which the right-wing social media sphere glommed onto this event itself proves how exceptional it is. OMG, Tucker, it finally happened!
If good guys with guns were saving victims of mass shootings on a consistent basis, we’d all know it. But if out of twenty mass shootings you have only one good-guy savior (and I doubt the proportion is that high), that’s not a tenable argument for arming everyone.
Moreover, one of the big gun-control pushes is to impose more stringent and numerous background checks on purchasers. This would increase the pool of “good guys” with guns and reduce the pool of “bad guys” with guns. If Trumpers truly believed their theory, they’d want that.
But they know, like everyone else, that the theory is hogwash. As Exhibits A and B, I give you the National Rifle Association’s ban on weapons at its last convention, and the prohibition of weapons at Trump rallies. Don’t you guys care about the safety of your audiences? If everyone at a Trump rally were armed, the good guys with guns would surely locate and take down the bad guy with a gun quicker than the Secret Service. Trump and everyone else in the audience would be safer.
Wouldn’t they?
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