A Tale of Two Responses

On October 1, 2017 over 500 people were injured and 58 people lost their lives when Stephen Paddock opened fire on concert goers at a country music festival in Las Vegas from his hotel room. This catastrophic event is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. As usual, when the responses came out following the shooting, the nation was shown honesty and compassion from the right and lunacy from the left.

The debate over gun control and the second amendment have long been a point of contention. There are those who recognize that the second amendment is a precious right that gives us the ability to bear arms in defense of ourselves and our families. Then there are those who don’t respect the Constitution and want to ignore the rights it provides us. Those are the people who always blame the gun for a mass shooting, not the evil person who held it. Although I have heard politicians make statements about guns for decades, I was still struck by the stark differences in the statements made about the Las Vegas shooting.

In speaking of this mass slaughter, President Trump got it right, calling it a “senseless act of pure evil.” He didn’t blame the gun industry for manufacturing the object used to carry out the horrendous act, nor did he blame the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) for supporting and defending the second amendment. President Trump correctly understands that guns are not the problem, evil people are. In our lifetime, we have seen Timothy McVeigh and his conspirators use fertilizer to kill 168 and the conspirators on 9/11 use box cutters to hijack airplanes they then used to kill almost 3,000 people. Those acts should teach anyone that, even if we eliminate guns from our society, evil people will find ways to kill other people.

Hillary Clinton, on the other (left) hand, was quick to politicize the horrific tragedy. Instead of blaming Paddock, she took a cheap shot at the NRA, tweeting, “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.” Hillary, who is protected twenty-four hours a day seven days a week by men with guns, showed her willful ignorance. In her world, the evil actor in Las Vegas was the NRA, not Paddock. And anyone who knows anything about “silencers” knows that they do not silence a gun, they suppress it. That is why they are more accurately called “suppressors.” But Hillary, like all liberals, doesn’t care about facts, she cares about furthering her agenda; her agenda includes getting guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.

I ask that you continue to pray for those recovering from the shooting in Las Vegas and for the families and friends of those who died because of that terrible act. We should also pray that God will deliver our nation from those politicians who ignore the evil among us.