Trump Levels Bloomberg for Saying Texas Shooting Hero Shouldn't Have Had a Gun
Sadly, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke didn’t make it to the primary round of the Democratic nomination contest. It’s a shame, if just because I wanted to see how “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” did once people started to vote.
Thankfully, when it comes to gun scolds, the Democrat field has exchanged a young, rich, energetic white man for an old, much richer, somewhat more soporific white man.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign is taking an unusual tack to things, bypassing the first few states in hopes of netting huge wins on Super Tuesday — particularly in California — dropping $200 million on ads in the process.
While Bloomberg isn’t necessarily as gun-focused in his campaign as he usually is, gun control is still at the top of his plate. After all, if you want someone who’s definitely going to take America’s AR-15s, you could do a lot worse than the founder/astroturfer of Everytown for Gun Safety and the man who helped bankroll the March for Our Lives.
And he doesn’t want to take away people’s guns so that the bad guys don’t get them. He’s not too sure about the good guys having them, either.
Take Jack Wilson. He’s the 71-year-old armed volunteer security guard who stopped a church gunman in White Settlement, Texas, last month, preventing a mass shooting. Pretty much everyone praised him as a hero or, if they were profoundly allergic to guns like Beto O’Rourke, ignored his existence entirely while using the shooting to push for their agendas.
Bloomberg one-upped Beto in this department. He doesn’t even think that Wilson should have had a gun.
The remark came when Bloomberg was speaking at a campaign event Dec. 30 in Montgomery, Alabama.
“It may be true — I wasn’t there, I don’t know the facts — that somebody in the congregation had their own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people,” he said.
“But it’s the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot,” Bloomberg said. “You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”
That the other option — waiting for the police to arrive — would lead to more deaths didn’t occur to Bloomberg. Nor did the fact that this might have just been an excellent time to be quiet. Nor did it occur to him that when someone says, “I wasn’t there, I don’t know the facts,” 99 percent of the time they should just stop there.
He didn’t, and the quote seems to have hung around longer than these things usually do. Whether it’s because this was particularly tin-eared or because it’s emblematic of Bloomberg’s, ahem, unique style of approaching the realities of the gun debate isn’t clear, but here we are.
It got to the point where even Donald Trump remarked on it Sunday.
“Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gun, and knew how to use it,” the president tweeted.
“Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage. Mini is against the 2nd A. His ads are Fake, just like him!”
Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gun, and knew how to use it. Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage. Mini is against the 2nd A. His ads are Fake, just like him!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 19, 2020
Say what you will about his pejorative nicknames (I think “Sleepy Joe” was better), he’s not wrong.
If Jack Wilson doesn’t reinforce a politician’s narrative about the world, it’s very easy to sit this one out. It’s impossible to deny that his quick action saved lives and that we’d be dealing with a much bloodier tragedy. Is this really a windmill Bloomberg really thinks his electoral brand is going to be improved by tilting at?
I suppose Mike Bloomberg can convince himself of anything in his little world, up to and including the fact this is what Democrat voters have really been waiting to hear — a voice so uncompromising on the issue of guns that it’s willing to say a hero needed to be disarmed because guns are bad.
Beto thought similarly when he went on a debate stage and declaimed he was going to grab your rifles were he elected. He got applause while he was up there. He spent the next few weeks answering how he was going to accomplish this, a load his already-faltering campaign couldn’t necessarily bear.
Bloomberg didn’t even get applause for this utterance despite the fact that, judging by the post-remark reaction, he’s going to have to undergo the same level of scrutiny.
He’s got a lot of other issues on his plate, mind you, including the fact that he’s pushed back his financial disclosure until after Super Tuesday and other candidates are savaging him for his decision to skip the first few primaries and focus on television ads and select appearances. (“He’s skipping the democracy part of this,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of the strategy in one of those stopped-clocks-blind-squirrel moments she can have.)
However, his rhetoric on guns is probably going to be the most lingering problem for his campaign. Even for a Democrat electorate tracking left, his ideas on guns and the Second Amendment are still on the party’s fringe, and he can’t win the nomination solely by doing well in big-ticket states like California and New York. That means he’s going to have to go to places where Democrats still believe, even if they want some level of gun control, that the Second Amendment has some relevance.
My assumption is that this clip is going to pop up more than once while he’s there. And, if by some miracle Bloomberg does make it through to face Trump in November, this is going to be playing on a loop.
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