Wash. Post Editor Compares Obama’s Newtown Shooting Speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

[Draggingtree]

The Blaze:

Wash. Post Editor Compares Obama’s Newtown Shooting Speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

 

Posted on December 17, 2012 at 7:50am by Billy Hallowell

It was a somber weekend following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 20 children dead on Friday. Last night, President Barack Obama passionately addressed the nation, speaking at a Newtown, Connecticut, interfaith vigil for the victims of the horrific attack. Following his speech, Washington Post associated editor David Maraniss was apparently so moved that he took to Twitter to compare the president’s words to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

“People will long remember what Barack Obama said in Newtown…his Gettysburg address,”

Maraniss tweeted.

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

Did he actually say anything, or did he (as I suspect) mouth platitudes?

[clearvision]

Evidently he did not use the word "gun" and only used the word "mental" once.... so no he could not have said much.

 

Here is another MSM (reuters) take: "His words have been eloquent and sympathetic, as they typically are when he is the voice of a nation in mourning. But President Barack Obama's response to a gunman's massacre of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut grade school has revealed a more complex view of the president: emotional, frustrated..."

[Casino67]

The WaPo is Barack's Monica.

[Pepper]

@clearvision @Casino67

Zero:

"If there’s even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try. "

 

 

 

The loss of any child is untold grief. Taking Obama's thinking to its absurd conclusion than surely we must stop driving cars, we must fill up swimming pools, we must remove all drugs and household chemicals from our houses, we must euthanize all household dogs, and we must remove pastic bags from the possession of adults.

[pollyannaish]

You can not fix the world completely. That is not ours to do. That belongs to God. When you do not have that to lean upon you thrash and make decisions that lead to worse tragedies.

 

That was not a great speech. It was an empty speech of imaginary ideas and shallow feelings.

[Casino67]

After one of these very unfortunate incidents, there should be a thirty day cooling off period before any new legislation is discussed. Knee-jerk reactions generally don't work out too well.

[Draggingtree]

@Draggingtree

 

Did he actually say anything, or did he (as I suspect) mouth platitudes?

Well if you see his speechs before then you know you have answered ur on question

[SrWoodchuck]

Couldn't watch the Chicago Messiah go through his e-motions. Were there more fake tears? Found this to be a good take on the tragedy & the ir-response: http://sultanknish.b...-guns-guns.html

 

If you're the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you're evolutionarily minded, then it's a 'chicken and egg' question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang, it was always here, coded into the DNA. If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the creatures who eat each other's young, and sometimes their own young, there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.

But debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pinhead is largely useless. We are not a particularly violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence.

The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.

The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.

The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.

 

Mostly it's about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.

But evil just can't be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.

 

Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, not to mention park rangers, ambulance drivers in the ghetto and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.

 

So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.