I found this one over on Addicting Info this morning. Thought you might like to take the time to read this one. Ms. Steelman did an absolutely wonderful job debunking a viral letter to the editor blaming Democrats for all this rampant gun violence we’ve been experiencing.
— by T. Steelman
Try not to vomit while reading the following collection of ignorance and right wing stupidity:
This “letter to the editor” has been making the rounds since January so I think it’s about time we debunked it. The letter is a hit job that originated with right-wing radio host Roger Hedgecock. The former mayor of San Diego has a radio show and podcast which he uses to spew his ugly messages. This one was picked up by viewers and redirected at local LTE pages nationwide. Let’s have a look, shall we?
The overall assertion is that progressive liberals are anti-gun and anti-second Amendment. Speaking as a progressive liberal gun-owner, um…. no. No we are not. What we are is anti-loophole and pro-sensible gun laws. The piece goes on to ask why we “… acquire guns, then kill movie goers and children in schools.” This charge is unsubstantiated and inflammatory, just like the rest of this piece of garbage. After setting up a nice, big straw man, the list begins…
Ft. Hood Shooter – registered Democrat and Muslim. Okay, that last one is correct, Nidal Hasan was a Muslim. However, he was not a registered Democrat. He lived in 2 states: Virginia and Texas. Neither state requires a partisan registration. Ergo, no registered Democrat here. Move along.
Columbine Shooters – Too young to vote – both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals. Harris and Klebold were, indeed, too young to vote. They lived in an affluent, conservative suburb of Denver, Littleton. Harris’ father was a retired Air Force pilot and Eric had expressed a desire to join the Marines. Both boys admired Tim McVeigh. So the idea that the boys were liberal is iffy while the claim that they were registered Democrats is demonstrably false.
Virginia Tech shooter – Wrote hate mail to President Bush and his staff, registered Democrat. Bzzzt! Wrong again! Seung-Hui Cho was, first of all, a resident alien and ineligible to vote in the U.S. Even if he could, Virginia is, as mentioned before, a non-partisan registrations state. He was not a registered Democrat. Whether or not he wrote letters, that’s not been shown to have merit.
Colorado theater shooter – registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, Occupy Wall Street participant, progressive liberal. This one is completely off-base. It’s based on shoddy research done by someone at (wait for it) Brietbart.com (I’m sure you’re shocked). That guy found A ”James Holmes” but it was not the one who opened fire in a Colorado theater. It is doubtful that the shooter was registered as anything. Some outlets that had taken Breitbart’s word for it (when will they learn?) retracted the allegations. Some, including Breitbart, did not.
Connecticut school shooter – registered Democrat, hated Christians. This one is based on the faulty reasoning that since Connecticut voted for Barack Obama at a 2-1 ratio, Adam Lanza must have been a Democrat. I don’t have to tell those of you who understand logic and statistics how dumb that premise is. In fact, Newtown voted for Romney. Lanza’s mother was a doomsday prepper and a home schooler who was, according to one source, a registered Republican. There is nothing to indicate that he hated Christians. But investigators did find an NRA membership certificate in his name. So we can call this one false as there is nothing to substantiate the claim that Lanza was a registered Democrat.
This is not to say that all mass shooters are Republican. Obviously, neither party sanctions this sort of behavior, at least, their leaders do not. The idea that a crazy person can actually act on behalf of any political party is a step too far. These are ideological crimes, when there is any motive at all – there often is not. That being said, a great many mass killings were committed by far right crazies. If you’ll recall the DHS report – the one that Fox raised such a stink about – it stated that there had been an uptick in right-wing violence and warned of further incidents from the same quarter. What happened there? Fox likes to play the false equivalence card and, short of reaching back into the 1970s, they were unable to find similar incidents of violence from the left-wing. So they whined and bitched and the new administration knuckled under. That doesn’t change the fact that they were correct.
Below is just a sampling of incidents of right-wing violence. Of course, the biggest attack was the Oklahoma City bombing, a horrible attack driven by political ideology.
- Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber, killed one (and one indirectly) and wounded 111 others. His motive for the bombing, according to Rudolph’s own admission, was political. He also had bombed an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb, killing 2 and injuring six. Extremist chatter on the Internet while he was evading capture praised him as “a hero.”
- In 1993 Michael Frederick Griffin murdered Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida. He waited outside Gunn’s clinic and shot him three times, yelling, “Don’t kill any more babies.” He is currently serving a term of life in prison.
- A little more than a year later, Paul Hill shot Dr. Bayard Britton in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Hill also killed Britton’s bodyguard, retired Air Force lieutenant James Barrett, 74, and wounded Barrett’s wife June, a retired nurse. Hill bragged that “… no innocent babies are going to be killed in that clinic today.”
- Anti-abortion terrorist John Salvi carried out two fatal attacks on two abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts in December 1994. Receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were killed in the attacks. He escaped but was captured after another clinic attack in which he killed 2 more receptionists on March 19, 1996.
- Anti-immigrant vigilantes murdered Raul Flores Jr and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia at point-blank range in their Tucson, Arizona home in 2009. A month earlier another young girl had died in a gun massacre in which anti-immigrant protestors were implicated.
- In 1998, James Kopp shot and killed Dr. Barnett Slepian. Kopp was affiliated with the militantLambs Of Christ anti-abortion group.
- Militia wanna-be Bruce Turnidge went apeshit after Barack Obama was elected in 2008. He and his son, Joshua, succumbed to NRA hype and fear. They built and planted a bomb at a bank in Woodburn, Oregon on Dec. 12th, killing 2 police officers and wounding two others.
- George Richard Tiller, MD was murdered inside his church on May 21, 2009 by Scott Roeder, a militant anti-abortion protestor. Tiller had been shot and wounded 16 years earlier by another anti-abortion militant, Shelley Shannon.
We can see from this sampling that these crimes were driven by ideology, not party. Mostly, it’s anti-abortion militants who seem to think it’s okay to murder people to protect life. Now there’s an oxymoron for you.
As far as the bogus letter to the editor, it is simply not true.
T. Steelman is a life-long Liberal. She has been writing online about politics since 2007. She lives in Western Washington with her husband, daughter, 2 cats and a small herd of alpacas. How can anybody be enlightened? Truth is, after all, so poorly lit…
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