One inevitable effect of highly politically and emotionally charged incidents like the shooting at a gay night club in Orlando is that it brings the extremists out in force.
On Sunday, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King crawled back out of the woodwork to offer up solution to preventing future acts of gun violence that was silly for a multitude of reasons, not the least of the them being a made-up statistic.
King took to Twitter, where he has more than a quarter million followers, to suggest:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/742126799191183361?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Among the many problems with this prescription is that the shooter who killed 49 people in Orlando on Sunday was not white, which at least makes the timing of the tweet questionable.
But the overarching problem is the blatant racism King demonstrates by painting all white people with he same broad brush. If he had stopped to think (big if), it might have occurred to him that vast numbers of white men self-identify as liberals and that at least some of them support more stringent gun legislation. The exact number is difficult to quantify (I am loath to toss out a random number is King did in his tweet, but a Pew poll from last April finds that 40% of white men are Democrats or lean Democratic). According to Census Bureau data, some 247 million Americans are white males. Of those, 99 million (= 40%) are Democrats or lean Democratic.
The bottom line is that in banning all white males from the nation, King would be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water … at least if his goal were genuinely to reduce mass shootings, as he claims, and not just to banish white men from the nation.
