National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch knows exactly what she is doing. Her job as a mouthpiece for the NRA is to shift the focus from looking at gun laws to looking at anything but gun laws.
Seriously, she doesn’t care if the focus goes from the Parkland, Fla., mass school shooting to the county sheriff’s department, which she tried to accomplish during a CNN town hall. She doesn’t care if the focus shifts to the FBI, the students or even the media, as long as it isn’t on the NRA.
That’s her job and she’s doing it well. Because Loesch isn’t just a paid talking head; she’s a gun-loving nut, and I say this with all due respect.
According to CNN, she’s authored a book called Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America, in which she focuses on the history of the Second Amendment and explains what “gun confiscation would mean to Americans’ basic rights as citizens.”
And she even has a tattoo on her right forearm of a biblical verse from the book of Ephesians that is a call to Christians to “put on the full armor of God” in order to protect themselves from evil.
Yep. So it shouldn’t be surprising that during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Loesch said some really crazy shit.
“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” Loesch said Thursday. “Now, I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back [of the room].
“And notice I said ‘crying white mothers,’ because there are thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend, and you don’t see town halls for them, do you?” Loesch asked. “Where’s the CNN town hall for Chicago? Where’s the CNN town hall for sanctuary cities?”
At this point, it would have been nice if someone from “legacy” media had snatched the microphone from Loesch and ordered the entire CPAC evacuated so that Loesch could have had her choice of several seats.
Seriously, the Chicago gun thing is just a tired cacophony of racist dog whistles the NRA blows whenever there is a push to change gun laws.
The Root staff writer Michael Harriot explored the Chicago gun issue in an article last year:
We know that crime rates in Chicago are on par with those of most major cities in America—until you factor in gun violence. When they try to figure out why cities like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York don’t have as many gun deaths as Chicago, they point the finger at gangs and “thugs” and ignore the elephant in the room: the state of Illinois’ lax gun laws. Unlike the National Rifle Association, the top gang thugs in Chicago don’t have a multibillion-dollar lobbying wing that bought and paid for the Republican Party.
The entire gun culture in Chicago thrives off of Illinois’ lax gun laws, and as such, guess who wins? The NRA. In fact, Chicago ....
Wait, you’re doing it.
Doing what?
Moving away from the issue at hand and trying to prove a point that has nothing to do with the actual topic, which is that kids were killed in Parkland because an 18-year-old can buy an assault rifle.
Damn, she’s good.
That’s how the NRA continues to shift the argument from guns to bump stocks. It’s how the NRA shifts the blame from mass murder to the media. It’s how the NRA makes a story about a mass shooter and how easy it was to get his hands on several weapons into a story about Chicago gun violence.
Don’t be tricked, America, and by “America,” I mean all of us who didn’t vote for Donald Trump. This is a long con game that’s rolled out whenever a shooting happens.
They will say anything to take the focus off guns, and I know it seems low, even for the NRA, to argue that the media loves crying white mothers just days after a tragedy, but nothing is off the table when it comes to preventing Congress from changing gun laws, and this performance from the soulless and deranged Dana Loesch is proof.