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All mass shootings convulse the nation, but this one falls in the middle of one of the nastiest, most divisive presidential campaigns in memory. And if there is anyone who might try to turn one of the worst atrocities in modern American history to his own warped ends, who could draw all the wrong lessons from the horror of what happened in Orlando, it is Donald Trump.
One can take the measure of a leader from his or her response to national trauma. So what did Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, do first? He congratulated himself, on Twitter, for having predicted such an assault and called for President Obama to resign. On Monday, he said, cryptically, “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or he’s got something else in mind.”
In a speech Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump doubled down on his outrageous call to bar all Muslims from entering the country. “When I’m elected I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States,” he said. “We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer.”
Aside from being offensive and un-American, this would do nothing to stop people like the shooter in this case, Omar Mateen, an American citizen born in New York and living in Florida. (To evade this inconvenient fact, Mr. Trump said in his speech on Monday that Mr. Mateen was born in Afghanistan — or “Afghan,” as he put it.)
Washington’s cowardly lawmakers have only made it easier by repeatedly refusing to pass even the most obvious and least burdensome measures, like universal background checks and a strong assault weapons ban, as well as not empowering the F.B.I. to block firearms sales to people on a terror watch list. Mr. Mateen — whom the F.B.I. investigated in 2013 and 2014 for suspected terrorist ties — may well have been stopped from purchasing his guns if such laws had been in place. And he was not alone in his choice of weapon. Before the slaughter in Orlando, 95 percent of the deaths resulting from domestic terrorist attacks since Sept. 11 were inflicted by guns, according to a 2015 analysis. Radical Islamic terrorist groups openly advertise America’s lax gun laws to encourage those who want to carry out attacks here.
NY Times
More reaction to donald’s misplay of current events really underscores his inability to THINK before opening his trap.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/us/politics/donald-trump-shooting-response.html
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