MSNBC Excuses Waffle House Shooter, Calls You and Me the 'Real Criminal'
It has become in vogue among the anti-gun left of late to literally excuse the perpetrators of mass shootings and violence in favor of casting blame upon the National Rifle Association and millions of law-abiding gun owners as being responsible for such atrocities.
Such was the case Monday on MSNBC during a discussion about the mass shooting at a Waffle House in Tennessee on Sunday, during which “gun culture” and the semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle itself was blamed for the tragic deaths, according to Newsbusters.
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle started it off with a question posed to The New York Times in-house “conservative” columnist Bret Stephens — who recently called for the repeal of the Second Amendment — and asked, “What is your message, I guess I want to ask, to those who say, ‘Don’t touch my guns no matter what’?”
“Well, that’s exactly it,” Stephens responded. “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.”
That is nothing more than blatant ignorance and fear-mongering, as up until recently, firearms were most certainly considered a mere “household implement” or tool, and there weren’t mass shootings happening on such a frequent basis.
After some snark about what the NRA’s messaging would be after this particular shooting, Stephens said, “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 handled with caution.
“The idea that the father would return (the guns used in the shooting) to his son 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,” Stephens said.
Ruhle then shifted to her other guest, Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude, who revealed himself to be just as ignorant about firearms and gun culture as Stephens, in that he actually blamed the mass murder on an inanimate object — the AR-15 rifle.
“But I think it’s important for us to say this, that if (the shooter) didn’t have an AR-15, right, he wouldn’t have been able to kill four people so quickly, in my view,” Glaude said. “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,” Glaude added. “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 (the shooter) 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 … but the real criminal here is that AR-15,” Glaude added.
Stephens then chimed in at the end to note that the Waffle House hero, James Shaw, who saved lives when he wrestled the gun away from the shooter, “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 concluded by insinuating blame for the mass murder rested with those who advocate on behalf of the Second Amendment and gun ownership. “Pointing to the real criminal being those who gave access to a mentally ill person, to an AR-15. It’s crazy,” she said.
So there you have it folks. According to the cultural experts at MSNBC, the perpetrator of the mass shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House was not responsible for the mass murder he committed. Instead, it was an inanimate object and those who promote the lawful ownership of that legal object that are to blame for bloodshed.
When one considers the fact that there are more guns in this country than people, and that there are tens upon tens of millions of Americans who own them — yet didn’t commit any gun-related crimes yesterday, or ever — one sees just how absurd the pablum spewed by MSNBC about guns really is.
The anti-gun crowd has made it clear that they couldn’t care less about the actual perpetrators of horrific crimes, but are solely interested in undermining the Second Amendment and demonizing those who support and promote that Constitutionally-protected natural right.
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