Just call it the liberal version of the Defund Obamacare movement — only more cynical.
In the aftermath last week’s Orlando massacre, where a man claiming allegiance to the Islamic State murdered 49 innocent people at a gay nightclub, the Democrats immediately moved to the address an issue totally irrelevant to the terrorist attack: gun control.
“This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub,” President Barack Obama said the afternoon after the attack. “And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”
Three days later, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy took to the Senate floor for a nearly 15-hour filibuster to demand his colleagues pass stricter gun control legislation.
“I’m at my wit’s end. I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of the ongoing slaughter of innocents, and I’ve had enough of inaction in this body,” he lamented.
Murphy ultimately ended his filibuster when Republicans agreed to vote on several gun control measures on Monday.
But nothing that will be voted on Monday would likely have stopped what happened in Orlando — or any of the recent major mass shootings in the United States, whether terrorism related or not.
In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl Sunday, Murphy struggled to defend the Democrats’ gun control push after Karl pointed out the irrelevancy of the gun control proposals to the Orlando terror attack. ABC Hammers Murphy: ‘Your Proposal Would Have Done Nothing’ To Prevent Orlando
“We can’t get into the trap in which we are forced to defend a proposal simply because it didn’t stop the last tragedy,” Murphy protested. “We should be making our gun laws less full of Swiss cheese holes so future killings don’t happen.”
There is nothing wrong with the Senate debating the merits of gun control. But it is unseemly to use a tragedy that had nothing to do with gun control to score political points.
Wouldn’t it be better to use the Orlando tragedy to debate policies that may actually be of relevance to what occurred? Take, for instance, the surveillance gap. As Politico Magazine reported last week, the FBI is grossly under-resourced. It is only able to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on between 50 to 100 potential terrorists in the U.S., a small fraction of the threat. Perhaps if the FBI had more resources, it wouldn’t have dropped its investigation of the Orlando killer. Isn’t the surveillance gap a more relevant concern to what happened in Orlando than gun control?
Or what about the threat of homegrown radicalization. Wouldn’t America be better served if Congress used the tragedy in Orlando to debate how we can fight against young Muslims in the U.S. falling into the grasp of radical Islam?
Then there is the matter of defeating ISIS itself. It doesn’t seem like the current American effort to defeat the terror group is going so well. Why not have a real debate in Congress post-Orlando about how to beat back ISIS and the serious and continuing threat it poses to Americans?
When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz led a filibuster of the budget bill to push his Defund Obamacare movement in 2013, most in the media correctly pegged it as demagoguery because it was obvious there was no way to defund Obamacare so long as the Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House.
The Democrats’ post-Orlando gun control push is not all that different from Cruz’s 2013 political posturing. Perhaps the major difference is the gun control effort is both more cynical and useless. Not only are the gun control proposals pushed by the Democrats unlikely to pass, but even if the proposals did pass and get signed it to law, there is no evidence they would stop future attacks like what we saw last week in Orlando. At least if somehow the Defund Obamacare movement succeeded and passed into law, it would have actually accomplished its stated aim.
So the Democrats are using the second worst terrorist attack on American soil to do nothing more than score political points in an election year. It’s disgusting and shameful. Worse, it is sucking up the oxygen from the real debates we should be having after the tragedy in Orlando.