Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer ripped into President Barack Obama’s almost immediate politicization of the fatal shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C. Thursday evening.
Appearing on “Special Report,” Krauthammer told guest host Chris Wallace that he doesn’t “think it’s appropriate” to politicize a mass murder of this kind “within hours of the event.” The conservative commentator added that “we should have a decent interval,” asking the panel if “48 hours is too much” time.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Look, I think the impulse to politicize these mass murders is, as George [Will] says, inevitable. But I don’t think it’s appropriate to do it within hours of the event. We should have a decent interval. Is 48 hours too much? During which we learn something about the facts and we have a decent interval in which we allow the dead to be buried before we jump on our personal hobby horse.
There are three factors involved in here, or possibly. Racism, gun control, and, my particular hobby horse, mental illness control or drug abuse control. Any of these could be the operative issue at hand. We don’t know. I’ve argued for a long time that since we changed our laws on incarceration, involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill, we’ve had an increase in these crimes. But I wouldn’t insist on it, and I certainly wouldn’t insist on it now. And I think we really ought to show a little bit respect for some things which are not soluble by law. The Toomey/Manchin proposal, the law that was proposed after Sandy Hook, was about assault weapons, which this wasn’t. And as to the giving of a weapon from one person to another, which had to be registered, there was an explicit exclusion for that happening within a family. Had the law passed, which it didn’t come close to passing, it would have had zero effect on this event.