By David Codrea, GUNS Magazine
Television reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were murdered in a surprise attack, shot to death while conducting a live interview for CBS Roanoke affiliate WDBJ 7. The killer, who I will not name, was a former reporter, terminated from the same station because of bizarre and aggressive behavior. He fled the scene and killed himself when police caught up with him.
Naturally, the blood-dancers came out in force, and just as naturally, before all the facts were known. After all, the killings were dramatic, they were recorded on the murderer’s phone, and (you can almost hear the “progressive” jubilation), the killer used a gun!
“Will America finally do something to stop our gun-fueled carnage?” The Washington Post’s editorial board asked in a hand-wringing headline.
“Something”…? Like what?
The WaPo scribes admitted they didn’t know how the killer got his gun, or if any proposed citizen disarmament edicts would have made a difference. They nonetheless demanded background checks, which the killer had passed when he purchased his gun. They demanded bans on “wholly unnecessary high-capacity magazines,” even though the killer did not use them. They demanded the government fund “studies” to come up with predetermined conclusions for anti-gun researchers to justify further gun edicts. Tellingly, they also admitted that the situational irrelevance of the crime they were responding to and the “solutions” they offered made no difference to them.
“[I]t doesn’t matter,” they insisted. “Tragedies such as these remind us of the easy, brutal efficiency that guns bring to the business of killing.” That’s because something must be done.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe called for reintroducing failed bills to disarm “people who commit various domestic violence misdemeanors,” and a one-handgun-a-month restriction, neither of which would have had any effect on the murders. But something must be done.
“The president does not advocate changing the Second Amendment,” Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary with the oxymoronic name weighed in. “He believes we can actually take common-sense steps that are entirely consistent with protections in the Second Amendment but would have an impact in reducing gun violence in this country.”
Like … you know, something.
“We have got to do something about gun violence in America,” Hillary Clinton declared. “I believe we are smart enough, we are compassionate enough, to figure out how to balance the legitimate Second Amendment rights with preventive measures and control measures so that whatever motivated this murderer, who eventually took his own life, we will not see more deaths—needless, senseless deaths.”
In other words, something must be done. That and what difference does it make?
She was appealing to her base, fanatics brought out of the woodwork, who added another predictable dynamic into the public discourse—angrily blaming gun owners, or as they like to call us, “ammosexuals” (and worse). With that mob, “blood on their hands” became the preferred meme over “something must be done,” although the fact that the killer didn’t fit a profile convenient to advancing their narrative proved somewhat of a dampener, or at least something they weren’t eager to talk about.
It could not escape notice that when an evil racist lunatic murdered black people in a South Carolina church, an incident that was a catalyst for the Roanoke killer, the “progressive” reaction, in addition to blaming guns and whites, was to ban Confederate flags from public displays and to call for the Taliban-like destruction of Southern heritage monuments. That there was no similar reaction when it was revealed the Roanoke killer was black, an occasional gay prostitute, an Obama supporter, and the author of a “manifesto” proposing a race war, said much about the double-standards of the left. Still, it only brought us back full-circle to something must be done—and anyone questioning that has blood on their hands.
One person who intends to do something is the father of the slain reporter. Andy Parker is now making getting more gun laws passed his “life’s work.” Curiously, he also says he’s buying a gun because “a lot of people take exception” to his new mission.
In a way, he’s the perfect face for the anti-gun movement, as all of us were sickened by the terror his beautiful daughter endured as she was being murdered. We who are parents, and who treasure our children above our own lives, share feelings of empathy and sympathy as we try to fathom the crippling horror, anguish and helplessness that he must be reliving in every waking moment, and in nightmares we can only pray we never dream. Our natural inclination is to want to offer comfort to someone in such pain. So Parker is the right man for the job because decent people can only imagine his loss and can’t bring themselves to get into a fight with him, even if he’s bringing it to us.
That said, we have to fight, not against the man, but certainly against the ideology he now represents. We’re sorry for his loss, but it’s not our fault. It does not give him a claim on our rights, and it does not make the ideas he promulgates above reproach. So we can start by noting his getting a gun because of their personal protective benefits is a useful admission, one that hardly fits with what the other antis would have us believe. It’s also fair to regard his insinuations as insulting. If anyone had made death threats against him for his activism, he would have filed police reports and, if they turned out to be from misguided gun activists, an elated media would have blasted them out as headline news.
The other thing we can and should do is look at Parker’s past, because his transformation into a gun law crusader was not so much a road to Damascus conversion as it was a direction he was already receptive to traveling in, albeit he never had the motivation before now to devote his life to the issue. Back in 2007, Parker ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Democrat. At the time, Virginia Citizens Defense League, the state’s premiere grassroots gun rights group, sent its political questionnaire to all candidates. Their tally sheet shows no responses to the questions next to his listed name, which, per VCDL, “frequently indicates indifference, if not outright hostility, toward the right to keep and bear arms.”
As long as we’re looking at survivors, it’s also instructive to note not all have emerged with the same sentiments. A case in point is Tim Gardner, who put things in their proper perspective for Fox News. He’s the husband of Vicki Gardner, the woman wounded in the attack as she was being interviewed.
“He was bound and determined to try to make a name for himself on live TV because he failed at it so many times,” Gardner said. “So no, I don’t blame the gun, I blame the guy that was holding the gun.”
Unfortunately, Andy Parker does not share that view, and he’s bound and determined that something must be done, even if he doesn’t know what.
“In my case, the answer is: ‘Whatever it takes,’” he wrote in an editorial carried by the Associated Press, and picked up as a slogan by Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown opportunists.
As something must be done to protect against infringements, that’s what gun owners must be prepared to do to as well.
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Thanks to the team at GUNS Magazine for this post. Visit GUNS Magazine online – Click here to go to GunsMagazine.com.
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