118 VIEWS Share Tweet Whatsapp Mail Pinterest Reddit

The Democrat-run media immediately dropped their regularly scheduled program of fluff news as far removed from any whiff of the disastrous Obama administration as possible to cover the tragic Aurora, Colorado shooting that took place at a late night screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises.

But this wasn’t just a sensationalistic media covering a breaking news event, but rather just another opportune moment for card-carrying Democrat “journolists” to attack the clearly non-violent tea party and to assail gun rights. Not that the activist media need any facts, or what used to be called “reportage,” to do so.

The mass murder took place at a multiplex theater late night and at least a hundred witnesses have varying reports on what actually took place. At such a time, when emotions are running high, there is a high risk of error. It is common practice to exercise great caution before jumping to conclusions about a news event.

When the news broke that the previously unknown suspect was one “James Holmes,” a 24 year old white male, the left-wing media again soiled themselves trying to connect him to the tea party. ABC News had an exchange between former Clinton staff George Stephanopolous and reporter Brian Ross that insinuated that there could be a tea party card to be played:

Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant. Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado. Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.

It was reported widely that there could be as many as 25 separate James Holmes in the Aurora area, and that the suspect’s car had Tennessee tags. It would be just as presumptuous to allege that the suspect was a tea party member as it would be to say that he was an Occupy Black Bloc thug or a card-carrying Democrat. It turns out that James Holmes is a 24 year-old PhD. student in Neuroscience, hardly fitting for most tea party activists.

The point is that now is the time to back off and gain some introspection about why this occurred. It is not the time to start casting aspersions or interjecting politics into the case.

But the media are running the Jared Loughner playbook once again. It’s all they know. Stay on the attack and keep trying to indoctrinate Americans that the leftwing way is the right way, and to hell with the facts and the human wreckage. Making spurious accusations that Sarah Palin was somehow responsible for Gabrielle Giffords’ shooter Jared Loughner’s psychosis was not just irresponsible, but cruel and baseless. The notion that the well-worn political symbol of a target could drive a normal person to shoot a Democrat congresswoman is flatly stupid, and anyone who would believe such a thing really should take a break from politics.

But the leftwing media are not able to help themselves in this case, just as they weren’t in the Loughner case or the Duke Lacrosse case or the Trayvon Martin case. They are incapable of learning, just as they are unable to separate the faux-compassion of their political agenda from the genuine emotion of caring about the feelings of individuals who are caught up in the tragic case at hand. The left must literally politicize everything; it is a Foucaultian impulse that leads to rampant cognitive fitting and selection bias. That is why it is impossible to reason with the hard left.

That is also why the Aurora shooting has prompted hasty calls for more gun control by the left, as led by New York City’s three-time Triumvir Michael Bloomberg. Just like in the Tucson shooting, and the Virginia Tech shooting before it, the figureheads of the left have to use every opportunity to push their gun control agenda.

It is obvious what the left’s ultimate “solution” to random acts of violence is: a police state and a defenseless populace. Would a completely disarmed theater audience be any safer than one where someone had a concealed weapon on him or her? The Aurora attacker was not even in the audience, but appears to have come through the emergency exit.

Those who want to associate the film The Dark Knight Rises, which has already received controversial and political reviews, with the mass murder in Aurora, should realize a few things. While the intensity of the violence in films may be going up, the number of total violent crime victims per 1,000 has gone down nearly 65% since 1973, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And as esteemed criminologist John Lott has documented thoroughly, more guns does mean less crime.

Tragedies are not the occasion for election-year jockeying or political revenge. But as the Democrats Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel have said themselves, never let a good crisis go to waste. But let’s be decent Americans and refrain from politicizing tragedies, only engaging the left to set the record straight and to protect any victims in the left’s path.