Using Mass Shootings to Political Advantage

It's happened again.  Just as we heard about the horrendous shootings in El Paso (I wrote about it here) we woke to hear about another deranged individual who did the same thing in Dayton, OH.  20 dead in El Paso and at this writing 9 dead in Dayton.  Analytically, this second shooting is not particularly surprising.  Experts will tell you that there are a lot of deranged copycats out there who will take action after being triggered by another nut case.

Predictably, some of the Democratic Presidential contenders are attempting to use the shootings to their advantage.  And they're doing that by blaming President Trump.  There is a story over on Huff Post about "Mayor Pete" saying that "white nationalism is condoned at the highest level of government".  You can read it here.  When asked if he thinks President Trump is a white nationalist he says that Trump encourages it.  He goes on to list several initiatives that I can get behind to help with this issue but it's difficult to even get there after such outrageous accusations.  There is no evidence to support these inflammatory accusations beyond the assumptions of people who hate Trump.  Now I'm not a huge Trump supporter and in fact he aggravates me routinely, but it's pretty easy to go down the list of Trump's so called support of white nationalists and refute each one as nothing more than conjecture based on Trump hatred.  In this time when we should be coming together to seek real solutions, Mayor Pete's words obscure that need.

I guess he forgets the mass shootings when Obama was President.  Or for that matter the ones that have happened both here and overseas for decades.  I didn't hear that kind of rhetoric then.  But running for political office seems to do crazy things to people.  Unless and until we decide as a society through our elected leaders that we're going to take action and put laws and regulations in place to do everything we can to prevent these things, we'll continue to go through the 10 stages of any shooting (you can read them in my link at the beginning) and nothing will happen.  Coming together as a society doesn't mean playing the blame game by politicians, religious leaders, or ordinary citizens.   

To me it's very clear.  If there is any blame to leveled Congress should be square in any thinking person's eyes.  Congress makes laws and could enact some sensible initiatives that would help.  And as I've written previously, it's not all about guns.  It's about mental health and what we do about nut cases.  It's about social media.  It's about violent, disgusting video games and how to control them.  It's about the drug culture.  It's about family values.  It's about personal responsibility.  It's about education.  Now I know that not all those issues are easy to impact legislatively.  But some are.  And Congress does nothing.  While they focus for two years on Trump the Russian agent until that is debunked and now focus on their current narrative of Trump the racist, nothing substantive happens.  They are worse than irrelevant.  They are a big part of the problem.