On Wednesday night’s The Last Word, hostLawrence O’Donnell played the 911 tape fromTuesday’s school shooting in Decatur, Georgia, and rightly praised the heroic efforts of aptly-named school clerk Antoinette Tuff, who showed incredible poise under unbelievable pressure. Then, Lawrence tossed the conversation to his panel, which resulted in some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard from a liberal panel on the subject of gun control.
I make that very important clarification, because compared to what comes out of conservative talk-holes on the subject of guns, this was a regular Mensa meeting, but when the good guys are messing up, it’s especially important to point it out.
Lawrence, for his part, was mostly on point, heaping praise on Antoinette Tuff for the way she talked shooter Michael Brandon Hill down, and correctly noting that “the NRA has made sure that the aspiring murderers are equipped with the best weapons,” but then everything went terribly wrong.
MSNBC.com’s Frank Smyth started off well by opining that Ms. Tuff “puts the National Rifle Association, Clint Eastwood, and Dirty Harry all to shame,” and even though Dirty Harry and Clint Eastwood are the same person, I was willing to go along with that. Then, he said “They’ve peddled this myth that only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun, and this proves that is not the case.”
This is where Lawrence should have stopped him and said, “No, this doesn’t prove that, the fact that effective gun regulations keep guns away from bad guys in the first place proves that.”
Instead, Smyth continued, “There are cases when an active shooter needs to be actively stopped, but there are very few actual cases where that occurred. and this demonstrates there are other approaches to public safety in our communities and schools that needs to be talked about and pursued.”
Smyth is correct that active shooters are almost never put down by a “good guy with a gun,” at least not before they’ve done all of their killing, and when the police do show up, as Lawrence noted, the NRA ensures that they’re often outgunned, but he’s answering that rarity with something else that never happens: a killer being talked down by a Jedi school clerk.
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