The shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, is turning into a David Lynch movie. First, there’s the sheriff who’s a Sandy Hook “truther,” now there’s the shooter’s mother who was stockpiling weapons and taking her troubled son to remote shooting ranges. She believed the government was about to confiscate guns, so she kept buying them. But here’s the truth: it is now far easier to buy weapons, and much harder to trace who owns them, than at ANY TIME IN US HISTORY. So where do so many people get the idea that the ‘guvmint’ is coming to take their weapons — when the ‘guvmint’ can’t even pass a single law regulating gun sales, and when there has NEVER been a single ‘guvmint’ proposal to “confiscate” guns? These hysterical lies stem directly from the rightwing echo chamber: Murdoch, Limbaugh, the NRA, etc. So how much responsibility do these deliberate liars bear for the actions of those who believe their base falsehoods? Plenty.
That said, let’s be clear about one other point: A president who directs drone bombings and death squads, who sends his secret armies to kill, subvert and sow division in 135 countries (at last count), who cheerfully allies himself with ISIS’s progenitors, Saudi Arabia, and gives them bombs and military intelligence to wage aggressive war in Yemen, killing thousands of innocent civilians, then protects his honored killers from UN investigation — this leader has zero moral standing to shed crocodile tears about the “violence in our society.” This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a poison being injected into the national bloodstream from every side.