“The people are tired of Moscow Mitch’s deadly obstruction,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared in response to the Milwaukee brewery murders in a tweet that has since been taken down and replaced with a longer statement citing “universal background checks” as some sort of solution. “A year ago, we took action in the House to save lives. Every day that he and the Republican-controlled Senate refuse to act, 100 Americans are killed by gun violence.”
Since so little information was released at that time, how any citizen disarmament bill floated by Democrats would have had any impact on saving lives is left unsaid. And that’s intentional.
Michael Bloomberg, the bodyguarded gun-grabber who almost let slip that he had “bought” Pelosi, was quick to slam President Donald Trump and call for “background checks,” per CNN Politics.
Bloomberg’s “seed money” venture, The Trace, wasted no time exploiting the killings to push its agenda. “True” to its journalistic “ethics,” the report aimed at disarming those of us who behave ourselves, was co-written by the “daddy issues”-plagued flack whose father was a mob hitman.
And Vox, ignoring that correlation does not equal causation, played to those who don’t think things through and tried to tie the killing in with Wisconsin Republicans rejecting disarmament laws that ignore due process. That’s hardly a surprise — being disingenuous about guns is SOP for those guys.
We still don’t know much about what laws (besides the obvious) the lunatic may have ignored. Reports citing the police say he had “two handguns, one with a silencer,” but do not mention their “legality.” If his suppressor was owned in accordance with the rules, Pelosi’s background check argument goes out the window. If not, background checks won’t stop black-market transfers anyway. And can you imagine the field day the antis would be having had he used a quote/unquote “assault rifle”? One with “20, 30, 40, 50 clips in a weapon”…?
What deterrents may have been in place are unknown (by me) at this writing. Per Molson Coors Employment Principles:
“Workplace Security Molson Coors is committed to maintaining a workplace that is free from violence, harassment, intimidation and other unsafe or disruptive conditions due to internal and external threats. Security safeguards for employees are provided as needed and will be maintained with respect for employee privacy and dignity.”
How they meet that commitment is unclear. Especially since the facility’s “No Guns” policy was ignored.
When I started gathering links for this article earlier today, his identity had been unannounced, and that was just revealed as I was writing this. That fits right in with what I blogged last night before going to bed, nothing prescient, just a realization of the way these things always seem to be handled:
It’s been hours and we still haven’t been told who the killer is? No doubt any social media accounts will be shut down before we do, meaning we will be entirely dependent on “authorities” and “Authorized Journalists” for information and unable to find any dots for connecting on our own.
Lo and behold, once the killer’s identity was released, we’re told his photo was “taken from a family member’s Facebook page that has since been removed.” Yet despite what appears to be an attempt to bury relevant background information, it was internet sleuths, not “Authorized Journalists,” who uncovered an Elizabeth Warren connection.
The first thing that’s obvious is we’re not talking about one of those “white right-wing nationalists” we’re constantly being warned are the greatest threat we face. If the killer had been one, and if he had social media posts brimming with sentiments that allow “progressives” to dismiss anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a Nazi, it would be headline news. It certainly would not have taken this long to release who he was, and odds are good some of his more egregious posts would have survived, at least in screenshot form. As it is, the victims are being blamed for racism, and that’s in spite of a corporate “code of conduct” policy that is now being alleged to work every bit as well as its “security safeguards.”
This in itself is dangerous to freedom. By hiding his identity until they’ve got their ducks lined up, and by ensuring his internet tracks have been swept to only release information supportive of the narrative being told by “the authorities,” our ability to glean public interest information, which is needed to be informed, self-governing citizens, is diminished and effectively deprived. If our only source of that information is the government, disseminated and amplified through its media mouthpieces, our system becomes no more credible or any less manipulative and tyrannical than China’s or Iran’s.
When that’s the only information out there, demagogues like Pelosi and Bloomberg can say whatever they damn well please without fear of being contradicted, or at least given a reality check. That’s the stuff that influences public opinion and finds its way into legislation with real-world effects on our freedoms.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but it’s one I’d like to see made part of a wider conversation. One can make the case that some information should be withheld pending notification of family members, and other information is temporarily suppressible because public dissemination may have an impact on police investigations, criminal proceedings, national security and the like.
That said, there ought to be a way to find out more about such freaks without government automatically putting their backgrounds on lockdown. Questions about what kind of causes and candidates a killer identified with are unquestionably relevant, not only to protect innocent parties from being blamed and smeared, but to keep political opportunists from circumventing the truth, exploiting ignorance, and imposing more infringements. Significantly, they can only get away with that when key facts are suppressed by those whose mandate should be “to secure the Blessings of Liberty,” and to enforce rights as well as laws.
