The President of the United States had plenty to say this week about visas and visa programs, merit-based or otherwise, and about Sen. Chuck Schumer and political correctness and even the death penalty, after Sayfullo Saipov drove a Home Depot truck over from New Jersey and used it to kill innocent people in lower Manhattan.
The President sounded once again as if he wanted to take laws he doesn’t much like, especially ones involving immigration, and fold them into party hats.
One month ago, though, after Stephen Paddock shot to death more than seven times as many people as the eight Saipov killed, here is what President Trump said in Las Vegas about guns and gun laws:
“We’re not going to talk about that today. We won’t talk about that.”
After this country’s worst mass shooting, a President who criticized his predecessor Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for their supposed reluctance to speak of radical Islamic terrorism seemed every bit as reluctant to talk about domestic terrorists.
But that is exactly what Paddock was, whatever kinds of snakes he had crawling around inside his head: Another domestic terrorist with a gun, one with enough of an arsenal to invade southern California.
Here, incidentally, is what Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in the shadow of the shooting in Las Vegas:
“Look, this is an unspeakable tragedy. Today is a day for consoling the survivors and mourning those we lost. Our thoughts and prayers are certainly with all of those individuals. There’s a time and place for a political debate, but now is the time to unite as a country.”
After the worst, unspeakable gun tragedy we’ve yet had in America, nobody was supposed to even have a conversation about gun laws or gun sanity. We likewise weren’t supposed to talk about guns after a man walked into a Starbucks in Chicago, the same week in America as when Sayfullo Saipov carried out his attack, and shot one person dead and injured two others — one a 12-year old boy.
So the gun laws in America, where we continue to lead the world in mass shootings, are apparently working swell. Just not the ones about visas. We are supposed to believe that better vetting and better visa programs are all we need to protect us from ISIS.
We’re supposed to believe that even though Saipov originally came to this country from Uzbekistan on a diversity immigrant lottery visa in 2010 — years before most people in this country had heard of ISIS, mostly because we were still hunting Osama bin Laden, the patron saint of Al Qaeda, at the time.
The President was still tweeting about visas when a 47-year old man named Scott Ostrem walked into a Walmart Supercenter in Thornton, Colo., Wednesday and shot three more people dead in the capital of shooting people dead, which means the United States of America:
Pamela Marques, 52. Victor Vasquez, 26. Carlos Moreno, 66.
Ask yourself: How would this shooting have been covered, what would have been the reaction from Washington, if Ostrem had been someone pledging allegiance to ISIS or yelling “Allahu Akbar” before or after opening fire? What would the reaction, not just in Washington but everywhere, have been if Stephen Paddock had pledged his own allegiance to ISIS after he shot all those people to death at a country music festival in Las Vegas and wounded hundreds more? What would have been the reaction from Washington if it had been an illegal or undocumented alien shooting up a Starbucks in Chicago or a Walmart in Colorado?
Of course it is a noble thing to protect this country’s borders from terrorists trying to come here from across the world to kill Americans. No one would ever suggest that we shouldn’t be as vigilant about that as the law allows. It is an honorable and tireless vigilance in our city especially that explains why what happened this week downtown is the worst terrorist attack here in more than 16 years.
It does not change the fact that the worst killers of Americans come from America. After Sept. 11, 2001, the two worst mass killers in modern American history are these two:
Stephen Paddock, Las Vegas, Oct. 1, 2017. Fifty-eight dead. Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995. One hundred and sixty-eight dead.
The other day Col. Jack Jacobs, a Medal of Honor winner for his valor in Vietnam and a child of Brooklyn, put it to me this way:
“We don’t talk nearly enough in this country about killing our own.”
We don’t do that, not in the current political climate, because there seems to be no political currency in it for the party in power, populated by so many bootlickers for the National Rifle Association, which itself continues to act as if one mass shooting after another are just the cost of doing business and — wait for it — our Second Amendment freedoms.
But those freedoms, you have to say, did nothing for Pamela Marques and Victor Vasquez and Carlos Moreno in Thornton, Colo., in the same week Sayfullo Saipov came over from Jersey in his truck.
So this is another tragedy, more people losing the gun lottery in America, after which we’re not supposed to talk about guns. Just visa lotteries.
