Just when you think you’ve heard it all from the majority party in New Jersey, a reminder that most politicians will use any tragedy to score political points. Within hours of learning about the horrific murder of innocents at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, NJ politicians took to Twitter to make a political point. Even for New Jersey Democrats this was a new low. Tweet after Tweet mentioning ‘Republicans’ and the ‘NRA’.
Here’s a tweet from Senator Bob Menedez who must be thinking about his own prospects for re-election in 2024…
Sad to see the desperate levels politicians will sink to in order to create division and call out political opponents as enemies – as if there are Republicans who are OK with the mass murder of kids. It’s absurd. If Menendez and others really took the time to assess this preventable tragedy with facts, they’d have to face the fact that Republicans, myself included, have been calling for the protection of soft targets, where teachers and children are vulnerable, for years. I outlined a simple four point plan in 2018 to address the issue and prevent a tragedy like this from happening again:
First: Prevent the killer from getting the gun in the first place. No easy task given the amount of guns on the black market, but doable if the states are able to focus on mental health and report people who are unfit so they pop up on a background check. Thankfully, leaders like Congressman Tom MacArthur are all over this one.
Second: Lock the schools and stop the free flow of access during the school day: ID, locks, armed guards. Try getting into a school in Israel to commit mass murder. Actually you wouldn’t succeed in Newark for that matter. Not gonna happen. Bring the same level of security to suburban schools.
Third: Allow people who are licensed and trained to continue to carry their weapon regardless of their location. According to one report, private citizens with a concealed carry permit (using data in Florida and Texas) are less likely to violate gun laws that police officers.
Fourth: Speak to your kids as adults. It’s a scary world. Situational awareness and a healthy respect for firearms outside of the nonsense and fantasy of typical killing video games would go a long way. There was a time when it was more common than not for American kids to take up riflery in school and there was no violence other than a few exceptions on the scale of what we have seen recently. One thing that’s changed is our culture of fear that comes from ignorance and agenda driven politicos, and media pundits.
After the Parkland school murders, I wrote an article addressing the immediate call for gun control from liberal Democrats as actually dangerous.
“What new gun control doesn’t address is the failings throughout law enforcement, social work and education that allowed the Parkland killer to remain free with the ability to purchase a weapon. What new gun control measures don’t address is the fact that we still have soft targets throughout New Jersey where children, worshipers and shoppers are still vulnerable every day. What new gun control doesn’t address is the fact that the more legal gun owners are vilified and organizations like the NRA are likened to terrorists, the gangs and terrorists become more emboldened.”
Here are some more egregious political attacks from NJ elected officials within hours of the horrific tragedy:
It’s clear that these Democrats are concerned with the national trend showing that there is a likely ‘Red Tsunami’ coming for the midterm elections. But to politicize the murder of children within hours goes beyond what we should ever expect from a politician even on their worst day.
Given the fact that the killer broke many federal and state laws already in place, the question is where’s the discussion about mental health, spending tax dollars to ‘harden’ these soft targets and empowering legal gun owners? All lost in a desperate attempt for desperate, out-of-touch Democrats to rally their radical base to overcome bad poll numbers. Sickening.
