Most fatuous presidential candidate of all?
by digby
It's very hard to choose the stupidest argument a right winger has made about the Planned Parenthood shooting, but I think this one might just be it:
“The problem is, the bad guys — the bad guys have guns. That’s the problem. The more people that we have responsibly carrying, the less — the less violence we are going to have in this country. And there’s no way around that. I believe that responsible people carrying weapons actually reduces crime in America and saves people’s lives. ”
That was Rick Santorum on Hardball yesterday. He also said that doctors and nurses are law abiding people who "should have the right to carry guns wherever they want to carry guns." In other words the real problem is that the clinic was a "gun free zone" and that's why those people died:
“Where do you think these people commit crimes? They go to places — these people who are ill, they go to places where they know no one’s going to have a gun.”
I honestly don't know how to respond to sophistry on that level. Does he really think that some armed fanatic with a long gun could have been stopped by a nurse with a handgun before he opened fire?? That she could shoot the gun out of his hand somehow before he could kill anyone? Because unless that's what you believe, that anti-abortion zealot would have killed innocent people regardless of how many guns and nurses and doctors were carrying on their person. Apparently, that's just the price we pay for "freedom."
And in any case, the man shot five well-trained armed police officers who were backed up by SWAT teams with military hardware. If they couldn't "take out" this right wing religious radical I doubt that some receptionist with a handgun would have had better luck.
How long is this country going to stand for this fatuous logic? What will it take to stop it? It's killing vast numbers of innocent people, far more than terrorism or war, and yet we just keep on facilitating carnage of sentient, breathing individual humans living in this world while the same fanatics who fetishize blastocysts throw up their hands and suggest we all become sharpshooters so we can protect ourselves as we go about our daily lives.
This is insane. We are insane. And there doesn't seem to be thing we can do about it.
Update: I wrote this before San Bernardino. Jesus Christ ...
.