Obama Stands on Graves of Children of Sandy Hook to Push Gun Control

Obama Stands on Graves of Children of Sandy Hook to Push Gun Control

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by Ben Shapiro
16 Jan 2013
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A new craze has swept the left in America: standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook to push gun control. First, it was Piers Morgan of CNN, implying that those who disagreed with him politically simply don’t care about the murder of kindergarteners.

Now it’s President Obama.

In one of the vilest orchestrated press rollouts in American history, President Obama trotted out the parents of a murdered child from Sandy Hook, stating:
[INDENT]You know, when I visited Newtown last month I spent some private time with many of the families who’d lost their children that day. And one was the family of Grace McDonnell. Grace’s parents are here. Grace was seven years old when she was struck down, just a gorgeous, caring, joyful little girl. I’m told she loved pink. She loved the beach. She dreamed of becoming a painter.

And so just before I left, Chris, her father, gave me one of her paintings. And I hung it in my private study just off the Oval Office. And every time I look at that painting, I think about Grace, and I think about the life that she lived and the life that lay ahead of her. And most of all, I think about how when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, we must act now, for Grace, for the 25 other innocent children and devoted educators who had so much left to give; for the men and women in big cities and small towns who fall victims to senseless violence each and every day; for all the Americans who are counting on us to keep them safe from harm.

He didn’t justify how any of his proposed legislation would have stopped Grace’s tragic murder. That’s because Obama has no justification. He just has emotion. And he’s going to push his agenda through a combination of unearned moral superiority and cheap gimmickry.

In fact, Obama’s entire press conference was built around the notion that logic and reason should have no place in the debate about gun control. He flanked himself with children – a pathetic attempt to hide bad policy behind the fresh faces of kids he could exploit:

I started getting a lot of letters from kids. Four of them are here today, Grant Fritz (ph), Julia Stokes (ph), Ini Zeha (ph), and Teja Goode (ph). They’re pretty representative of some of the messages I got. These are some pretty smart letters from some pretty smart young people. Hinna (ph), a third-grader -- you can go ahead and wave Hinna (ph), that’s you. Hinna (ph) wrote, “I feel terrible for the parents who lost their children. I love my country, and I want everybody to be happy, and safe.”

And then Grant, go ahead and wave Grant, Grant said, “I think there should be some changes. We should learn from what happened at Sandy Hook. I feel really bad.” And then Julia said -- Julia, where are you? There you go. “I’m not scared for my safety, I’m scared for others. I have four brothers and sisters, and I know I would not be able to bear the thought of losing any of them.” And these are our kids. This is what they’re thinking about.

Well, so are we all. We all wept when we heard about Sandy Hook. We weep still. But we also want to pursue solutions that preserve the rights of Americans and actually protect children. We aren’t interested in posturing. We’re interested in effectiveness.

President Obama is not. Instead, he takes gun control advice from children. Here’s how far we’ve fallen as a country: we mocked President Jimmy Carter in 1980 when he said that he worried about nuclear proliferation because his 13-year-old daughter, Amy, did. Now, we celebrate a president taking his legislative cues from a group of first graders.

Perhaps the seven-year-olds can lay out their debt ceiling strategy for President Obama, too. After all, they can’t do any worse than his current team.

But Obama wasn’t done yet. He laid out the worst possible justification for any law, the “if it can help one person” justification:

Because while there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil, if there’s even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.

This is perhaps the least sensible basis for law in the history of man. Of course we have an obligation to try to save lives – while balancing that obligation with rights and responsibilities. But by Obama’s logic, we should ban cars, buckets, hammers, and donuts. After all, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.


But this is Obama’s fearmongering: never let a good crisis go to waste. Utilizing our fears to achieve step-by-step deprivation of American rights – deprivations that make us no safer – is Obama’s plan. And he must exploit emotion to the hilt in order to achieve that plan. So he does.

This is not adult conversation. It is childish posturing. As Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) put it, “the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally.”

But the media loves this nonsense.

So Obama will continue to preach from atop the graves in Newtown. He, along with his media lackeys, will continue to draw a false dichotomy between caring Democrats and uncaring Republicans, even as Obama leaves children just as unprotected as before and invades the rights of 300 million Americans.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).

Video at the page link:

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