Mass shootings inspire the best and worst in people.
These moments of tragedy can inspire empathy. They can move traditional enemies to drop their long-standing grudges to at long last view one another as human beings deserving of dignity and kindness. These unscripted bursts of violence can also inspire people to engage in their pettiest and lowest impulses.
Take, for example, the Atlantic’s David Frum and his reaction Wednesday morning to reports that a gunman had opened fire on Republican lawmakers as they practiced in Virginia for the annual congressional baseball game.
“Virginia: No background checks. No licensing. No registration. No permit [required] for concealed carry of long guns. Open carry long guns & handguns,” he said on social media.
First, nearly everything in Frum’s note is inaccurate.
“Virginia, like all states, requires a background check on all new gun sales and all sales through licensed gun dealers,” the Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski, a licensed firearms instructor, said Wednesday.
“Unlike many other states, Virginia requires a new FBI background check on each licensed gun sale even if the buyer has a [carrying a concealed weapon] permit,” he added.
It’s worth noting that the suspected shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, 66, was reportedly a resident of Illinois, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
“And, of course, Virginia requires a permit to carry a concealed handgun. The permit only allows you to conceal a handgun, not a rifle,” Gutowski wrote.
Like every other state in the union, Virginia also requires registration for specific types of firearms, mostly machine guns, in accordance with the National Firearms Act. Further, Gutowski added, in regards to Alexandria, Va., where the shooting took place Friday morning, it is illegal to “open carry of loaded semiautomatic rifles & pistols … without a license.”
Probably not Frum’s greatest moment.
The most difficult thing here is making heads-or-tails of his overall point, which he expanded on later in an article (comically enough, nearly all of his earlier claims about gun ownership in the Old Dominion State are omitted from his column, and he ends instead with a Scripture-based appeal).
“We’ll learn more about when the Alexandria murderer decided on his crime, and whether his weapon was legally acquired. The commonwealth of Virginia certainly did its utmost to ease his way, however, by conferring the legal right to move about with an openly brandished rifle,” he wrote.
Huh? Virginia is at fault for not imposing Alexandria’s open-carry ban, which, by the way, the shooter violated, on parts of the state where no one was attacked Wednesday? If only there were laws making it illegal to break other laws. More seriously, though, it’s difficult to ascertain Frum’s larger point in light of the fact that many, many laws were broken Wednesday.
But let’s put his flubbing of basic facts aside for a moment:
The bigger and more obvious problem here is that the impulse to smear “I told you so” across the Internet during these tragedies is not only unhelpful but also cruel to the victims and their families.
Responding to mass shootings by riding around on the gun-control hobby horse or using events like the one on Wednesday to attack the liberal media reveal a certain kind of callous disregard for the human condition. Using these sorts of attacks to pin the blame on certain groups or persons is crass. It also stinks of opportunism, especially when the facts are unclear.
Frum is hardly alone in doing this. It’s a bipartisan problem.
As we wrote January following a deadly shooting spree at an airport in Fort Lauderdale: Don’t be like the social media activist who runs immediately to his favorite message board, looking for ways to find some piece of evidence that proves the attack was carried out by a Jihadi, or a liberal, or a progressive, etc. Don’t be like the Center for American Progress’ Igor Volsky, whose standard reaction now to gun-related mass casualty events in the United States is to troll GOP lawmakers who’ve accepted campaign donations from the National Rifle Association.
It is easy to be carried away by emotions after these sorts of deadly incidents. It is maddening. It is senseless. It is tragic.
It is not, however, an invitation for you to further your pet political cause.
