Let's get the facts
Published December 1, 2015
by Doug Clark, Off the Record, Greensboro News-Record, November 30, 2015.
Playing the blame game following the Planned Parenthood shootings in Colorado Springs, at this point, is premature and unfair.
Not a lot is known about the suspect, who once lived in the North Carolina mountains, and what is known shows a man who is hard to understand.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is being criticized for calling Robert Lewis Dear a "transgendered leftist activist," but I don't think the Texas senator was serious. Well, I hope not. You never know.
Cruz was referring to Dear's Colorado voter registration, which lists his gender as female.
Dear doesn't otherwise seem to present himself as female, so I suppose the point is that some information may be misleading.
I don't know how Cruz concludes that Dear is a leftist but, again, no one knows much right now.
We shouldn't use tragedies of this kind as launching pads for political attacks. Of course, that's exactly what happens. The terrorism in Paris, for example, was immediately blamed on President Obama's policies in Syria and Iraq by Republicans like Cruz. Now Democrats claim that anti-Planned Parenthood rhetoric by the likes of Cruz, Carly Fiorina and others stirred up the violent impulses in the Colorado Springs killer.
And then there's easy access to guns. If the suspect was simply crazy, why was he allowed to own firearms?
None of this gets us anywhere right now. The politicians need to let the appropriate law-enforcement agencies conduct their investigations and determine how this happened and why.
Then we can draw political and policy conclusions.
December 1, 2015 at 10:23 am
Norm Kelly says:
It's also true that media type allies of the leftist party need to be held accountable for jumping to conclusions. Just like the current occupier who always makes statements about tragedies BEFORE he knows any of the facts, and he usually gets it wrong, everyone needs to make statements only when facts are known. But of course, just like media allies, the current occupier usually finds a way to blame stupid white people for problems. Or simply Republicans. Just like media allies!
If it turns out that this killer was/is a whack-job, leftist, transgender person, one must wonder how the leftist party and their media allies will spin it. We already know he's a whack-job.
In the meantime, until some facts are known, it's pointless reading anything about this incident or his motives or his background. Which is why I choose to ignore most of it. And if part of this story does NOT fit the leftist party agenda and their media allies when it comes to gun confiscation/restrictions, then we won't hear much more about this story. On the other hand, if leftists can spin this story to fit their gun agenda, they will, starting with the loser occupier, who will make another statement about stupid white Republicans.
