It takes a special kind of scoundrel to demonize Americans calling for gun control as a way to prevent mass shootings in schools, such as yesterday’s mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But the despicable Tucker Carlson was more than up for the job.

Carlson tried to blame any and everything for the Parkland shootings other than the actual weapon used to slaughter the students

Just as he did for those who support immigration reform a week ago, Carlson smeared those he disagreed with as likely to cause a civil war. In this case, over gun control. He just forgot to mention that a majority of Americans support new gun control legislation.

But first, Carlson came up with a bunch of hypothetical explanations for the Parkland school shooting that he didn’t even bother to research.

“Tragedies like this happen for a reason and it probably doesn’t have a lot to do with guns,” newly-minted sociologist Carlson opined. His “proof” was that the percentage of American households with guns “has dropped dramatically over the past 35 years.” He just “forgot” to mention there has been a rise in gun “super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.”

Carlson hypothesized that the rise in mass shootings might be due to “far more Americans than ever before” taking “psychiatric medications.” “Are outbursts of violence a potential side effect? We don’t know but it’s possible,” Carlson supposed, without offering any evidence.

Or maybe it was the “social atomization of society” or the collapse of the nuclear family. Or the oppression of men. “As a group, men are not thriving in this country right now. Ignore the propaganda,” Carlson intoned. He promised a month-long series about “what is happening to men.”

Carlson employs faux "reasonableness" as cover for fascist attacks on gun control supporters

“We ought to do our honest best as a nation to figure what exactly is going on here. But we’re not doing that,” Carlson said with his “gee whiz” disingenuousness. And this is what’s so pernicious about Carlson: his “I’m just a regular guy looking for the truth" shtick serves as a pretext for hate mongering to come.

Sure enough…

CARLSON: That conversation has been drowned out and made impossible by mindless screeching about gun control, led by blustery charlatans in the media. You know exactly who they are. And also in Congress, whose only real agenda is moral preening. They aren’t trying to solve the problem. Their aims are darker than that.

Now that’s rich! It’s a phrase I love to use when speaking about pretends-not-to-be-an-elitist Carlson, who recently purchased a new Washington, D.C. home for nearly $4 million. Because moral preening and dark aims were exactly what Carlson was up to here.

CARLSON: A piece on Vox.com today calls for a landmark gun-control bill like the one Australia passed 22 years ago in 1996. That’s the law that liberals are always telling you about. But the Australian law wasn’t gun control and it wasn’t a voluntary buyback, no matter what they tell you. It was gun confiscation, a wholesale mandatory disarmament of the entire civilian population. Imagine what would happen if you tried that here in this country. America is not Australia for a bunch of reasons including our history, and our Bill of Rights. Imagine federal officials marching from house to house, seizing hundreds of millions of firearms from law-abiding citizens, and then fining and imprisoning those who resist. Vox approvingly calls this leadership. In fact, it’s a recipe for bloodshed and civil war. It’s nuts. Yet it is a common fantasy on the left.

What phony-baloney truth seeker Carlson didn’t tell viewers is that Vox was arguing for leadership in gun control, not for the U.S. to completely emulate what Australia did. But more importantly, Carlson failed to mention that since then, Australia’s homicide and suicide rates have decreased and there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia.

What is Carlson so scared of about gun control supporters that he has to resort to such reprehensible tactics?

Instead of telling the whole truth, Carlson opted for more hate mongering and smearing – something even more despicable when the country is still reeling from this tragedy.

CARLSON: The calls you are hearing today for gun control have nothing to do with protecting Americans from violence. What you’re witnessing is a kind of class war. The left hates rural America, red America, gun-owning America, the America that elected Donald Trump. They hate them. Progressives are still in charge of most of the major institutions in this country and they despise the autonomy of an armed population. They want collective punishment for the sins of a few. They seek to obliterate our core constitutional right rather than trying to mitigate its downsides. They call it gun control, but it’s not. It’s people control. For the left, voters who can’t be controlled can’t be trusted.

According to a GQ profile, Carlson grew up in tony La Jolla, California and has spent most of his adult life in Washington, D.C., went to Trinity College (in Hartford, Connecticut), and unless you count his family vacation home in Andover, Maine, has probably never lived in rural America. I wonder how many "regular" folks from the heartland Carlson and his wife entertain in their new 7,400 square foot, five-bedroom house with a gourmet kitchen, a home gym and a swimming pool.

So who really hates America, Tucker? Those who are trying to save children’s lives with measures supported by the majority of Americans or a talk show host who deliberately smears and maligns just about every American he disagrees with?

Watch Carlson exploit a tragedy to sow hostility and division, all for the sake of disparaging anyone looking for a solution to our epidemic of gun violence, above, from the February 15, 2018 Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Originally published at Newshounds.us