THE LEFT’S LAMPOON OF A NATIONAL TRAGEDY

BY GUNNAR BOWLES

On June 12, 2016, the United States of America suffered its worst terrorist attack since the September 11, 2001 attacks that brought down the World Trade Centers and robbed us of 2,996 blameless, precious, lives. As the death toll in Orlando rose to 49, I, like many of my fellow Americans, waited for the response from President Obama. In times of trial and tribulation the president occupies a unique position as both a soothing and reassuring presence, meant to inform Americans of the terrible tragedy that cannot ever be expunged, and to inoculate Americans against despair. As a father or mother comforts their child and provides guidance, so too should the president turn toward the American citizen and offer him hope and reassurance as to his national future.

We needed a guarantee, a pledge from this president that he would reevaluate the threats facing America and formulate a solution, no matter how tough, that might prevent American soil from ever again being stained with her own citizens’ blood. Instead, we, the American people, suffered a different speech; a speech that stood upon the corpses of those slain, not only in Orlando, but in San Bernadino and even Paris – a speech that haughtily proclaimed that it is not Radical Islam responsible, but, rather, our own ineptitude and boorish, intolerant ways.

Prior to the president’s speech, I was particularly interested as to how he might address the terrible events that transpired. For those on the left, this tragedy placed them in a perplexing quandary – between the proverbial rock and a hard place – as one of the staunchest members of the liberal establishment (a homosexual, Muslim Democrat) had massacred many others. Where the president’s speech should have provided rational insight and logical reasoning as to the cause of this horrific massacre (and potential solutions to prevent another), Mr. Obama simply and arrogantly misdirected the understandable outrage and shirked any semblance of responsibility that, he himself, most assuredly bears relative to his administration’s wanton neglect of the global threat that is radical Islam. When United States’ citizens were slaughtered by a man declaring submission to the Islamic State, the president chastised those very Americans for none other than exercising their constitutional, and God-given, right to possess the very firearms that might equip them to defend friends and family from such a monster.

For those who subscribe to the increasingly exasperating ideology of conservatism, this response was both foreseeable and dispiriting. As has become so stale, President Obama did not fail to retreat to the haggard words of Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a good tragedy go to waste.” As Mr. Emanuel served as Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff it does not take a liberal imagination to draw the conclusion that these words are ringing just as true in President Obama’s own mind now as ever.

Instead of attacking the motive and what propelled the Orlando shooter to murder innocent lives, Obama and the Left’s perverse response attacks the mechanism through which he committed his atrocity. Rather than deal with the problem in a direct and responsible fashion, the current administration has decided gross negligence and red herrings are keen enough to mislead the public and stymie the fervor for actual progress to be made.

Perhaps, however, it should not be conservatives who are the most outraged regarding the liberal demagoguery occurring, and, instead, the LGBT community that should be incensed by the Obama administration’s ploys. In simply misdirecting the nation’s wrath toward guns, liberals have refused to recognize the perpetrator behind the vicious attacks. In refusing to recognize the perpetrator behind the vicious attacks, liberals have chosen sides. Between Islam and the LGBT community, the liberals have chosen Islam.

In recognition of the folly of the current administration that appears to be under the jurisdiction of a flawless ineptitude that has our country careening toward the precipice of collapse, the question now pertains to how we Americans are going to respond. Shall we become divided as a nation and succumb to the pitfalls of discord and infighting over a subject that is unassociated with the tragedy, or shall we unify, picking each other up along the way when we fall or stumble and devote ourselves toward making rational and sensible progression in defeating those who wish to bleed our brothers?

Originally published by BarbWire.

Gunnar Bowles is a current Sr. at Liberty University pursuing a major in both Politics & Policy and Western Legal Tradition with a Business minor. Following his undergraduate career he plans to attend law school.