On Wednesday evening, disturbing reports emerged of a mass shooting at a brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An employee of Molson Coors Beverage Co. shot and killed five co-workers before taking his own life, in yet another tragic display of violence.
The facts of the shooting are far from clear. We have no idea whether any current or past gun control proposal would have actually done anything to stop this from happening — usually, there is no connection. But that didn’t stop some Democrats from using the issue to push their anti-gun agenda.
Never one to “let a crisis go to waste,” 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren jumped on the Wisconsin tragedy within hours to promote her gun control agenda. “We need to act now to end the gun violence epidemic,” she tweeted alongside her condolences. The Massachusetts Democrat was joined by other elected Democrats, such as Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., who shamelessly exploited the tragedy for political purposes when he tweeted, “Americans continue to die while McConnell’s Republicans do nothing.” Other Democratic congressmen such as Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., also used the tragedy for political purposes, as did the anti-gun group Newtown Action.
In contrast, some Democrats, such as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, deserve credit for putting out measured and fairly apolitical responses, waiting for facts to come in. So, too, Republicans such as Sen. Ron Johnson and President Trump both offered their condolences without immediately politicizing the event.
This, rather than Warren’s shameless grandstanding on fresh corpses, is the proper way to respond to a tragedy. We don’t know the details of this Wisconsin shooting, and whether they even support one side or the other of the gun debate. As a matter of fact, even the Washington Post’s fact-checker admitted in 2015 that none of the mass shootings from that time would have been prevented by the gun control legislation being considered and proposed at the time.
The idea that these tragic incidents somehow validate the Democrats’ position is a fallacy, as again and again they propose measures that would not prevent the shootings that occur. What’s more, the immediate and shameless politicization of every tragedy by Democratic lawmakers is distasteful and polarizing.
