You’ve got to love these people. They stay on message like programmed bots. No matter how ridiculous the positions they back themselves into, they can only see the object of their message discipline. Horses wearing blinders have better vision.
Earlier today, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes went viral with a tweet so wonderful, there should be a Sondheim musical built around it. (“Explosives in the Dumpster with Ahmad”?)
We're also very very lucky that the attackers tried to use explosives rather than guns.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 19, 2016
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It immediately occurred to many of his numerous critics on Twitter that Hayes was being a twit. OK, OK: that, and that the mass stabbing attack in Minnesota was stopped by an NRA instructor using a gun.
https://twitter.com/yesnicksearcy/status/777902921027506176
But it wasn’t just the knife attack in Minnesota that was stopped by a guy with a gun. Bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami also had to be stopped by guys with guns. When a citizen notified police of his whereabouts, after he was announced as a suspect, Ahmad shot an officer approaching him, and had to be subdued with the use of firearms. Ultimately, two officers were injured in the shootout with Ahmad Rahami.
We will never know if Rahami might have injured more people, or killed someone, by using guns instead of explosives as his opening gambit. That proposition wasn’t tested. We do know for certain that it was good guys with guns who prevented both Rahami and the attacker in Minnesota, Dahir A. Adan, from succeeding in killing any victims.
And this next point is awfully important: we know this for certain not because we’re hoping for inexplicable “luck,” but because we can trace the consequences of human intent, and the routinely, replicably demonstrated effectiveness of firearms in mortal-threat situations.
It’s an interesting exercise in logic, to contemplate what the moral of this story may be. It takes a powerful urge against rationality, for example, to insist that the moral cannot be this one: definitely keep guns out of the hands of Muslim immigrants. If you went solely by rational deduction, that would be the first axiom you’d come up with.
In terms of logic, this axiom has at least as much as the anti-gun theme about “keeping guns out of the hands of white guys who use Confederate flags as their social media icons.”
Oddly, I’m quite sure Chris Hayes would be horrified at the first proposition, but would argue strenuously for the second.
Or maybe, given the illogic at the core of leftism, not so oddly. The more logically consistent position, however, is that neither axiom should be the moral by which we govern ourselves.
Some tweeps, meanwhile, took the trouble to post reminders of the damage explosives can do.
Indeed. pic.twitter.com/mc8mjJv9JP
— Bob Owens (@bob_owens) September 19, 2016
