“The gun control President”

Considering that even such left wing arbiters as Salon are calling President Obama “the gun control President,” I think a few words are in order.

Starting with Salon’s words:

By design, it wasn’t until the end of his hour-long remarks that Obama got around to gun violence. His speeches tend to build toward emotional climaxes, and his most gripping material involved guns.

“It has been two months since Newtown,” he began. “I know this is not the first time this country has debated how to reduce gun violence.  But this time is different.”

This time? Presumably, the president means post Newtown, Massachusetts. A teenage psycho murdered his mother and stole her guns and went on to shoot a bunch of children. What is “different” about that? How does one more psycho killer make things any more different than the last psycho killer before that, or the last psycho killer before that? There will always be psycho killers, will there not?

To be fair, the president also mentioned (without saying so) gun criminals.

Then he raised the stakes by making it personal, invoking the story of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl who was gunned down just after traveling to D.C. to perform at Obama’s inauguration last month. “She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss,” he told the chamber, and her family deserves a vote, just like the more than two dozen families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook.

There’s more from the speech here:

 “She was 15 years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends, they all thought they were her best friend,” Obama said. “Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington, with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration. And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house.

Hadiya Pendleton, a teenager, was shot and killed in one of those tragic gangbanger killings that have outraged so many people.

Including me. I’m outraged too. Outraged because I don’t think the president has done this poor girl justice.

Hadiya is not the victim of “gun violence” for God’s sake. She is the victim of gun crime.

There is a huge difference, and John R. Lott has an eloquent piece in today’s New York Post on that very subject.

Gun control “deserves a vote,” President Obama said time and again in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Sadly, the measure Congress is most likely to pass — beefed-up background checks — may cause more harm than good.

First, checks obviously won’t do anything about gun crime in cities like Chicago or New York, which revolves almost exclusively around illegal guns.

But they also wouldn’t stop the mass killings Obama mentioned. The Newtown, Conn., shooter stole his mother’s guns, while the Tucson, Ariz., and other killers didn’t have records that a check would’ve spotted.

Lott (who was talking about the obvious futility of background checks) might not have meant to zero in on the framing issue, but I have read the transcript of the president’s address, and I see not a single mention of “gun crime.” Instead of talking about crime (or even illegal guns, such as the gun that likely killed Hadiya Pendleton), the president talks only about “gun violence.”

What is “gun violence”?  It seems to me that the term is intended to include more than gun crime. Otherwise, why not just say “gun crime”? And if “gun violence” includes more than crime, then what else?

Does “gun violence” include armed self defense?

Is the president opposed to legitimate armed self defense? If he is, then why not say so? Why the need to sneak leftist anti-gun subtexts into his State of the Union Address? I’d like to know why the president won’t say he is against gun crime, and gun criminals.

Is it possible that we have a president who is against self defense?

I think it’s a legitimate question to ask. Especially if we look at what has been happening in schools.