The Problem is not Guns, Gun Laws or Mental Health

The recent and tragic mass shooting on an Oregon junior college campus sparked the sadly predictable reaction for the liberal left.

It didn’t take but a minute for President Obama to find a camera and a microphone so that he could express his faux outrage and place blame on his usual list of suspects.  Republican lawmakers of course made the top of the President’s list with the National Rifle Association taking up a very close second place.  And of course the typical reasons for the blame was placed, uncaring people, greed and political posturing.

Social media lit up as well, with liberals reviving all the old MEMEs that said more of the same.  And to cap it all off, we now have Nancy Pelosi jumping in to the fray and calling on Speaker of the House John Boehner to create a Select Committee to investigate what she labels as a "crisis of mass shootings”.  In her letter to the Speaker she writes:

"As we pray for those who lost their loved ones at Umpqua Community College, we must address the tidal wave of grief guns have caused to so many families."

It is pretty hard to take Pelosi seriously.  Where is her concern, each and every Monday morning, when the reports roll in on how many lives were lost, over the weekend, due to black on black violence in the poor black communities across our nation?  Do these black lives not matter to Mrs. Pelosi?  Maybe it is that she is hiding from these particular deaths to shield herself from the shame she bears in being a part of the 50 years of failed social engineering responsible for these deaths, that failed social engineering fully orchestrated and supported by her Democratic Party.

But I digress.

In the President’s press address, shortly following the shooting, he was quick to politicize the tragedy and did so admittedly as he felt doing so would be the only way to bolster actions.  Obama stated:

“Somehow this has become routine.  The reporting is routine.  My response here at this podium ends up being routine,”

 

And President Obama is 100% correct, this has all become far too routine, even more so in recent years, which got me to thinking!  It got me to thinking as to just exactly how much more routine have these tragic mass shootings become in recent years?  I decided to find out for myself and this is what I came up with.

Using mass shooting data sited from a MotherJones investigation I looked for the number of times that four or more mass shootings occurred in a given calendar year over the past 27 years, starting in 1989 and going on through to 2015.  What this revealed was that in the first 18 years (1989 through 2006) there were only two years in which four or more mass shootings occurred.  In sharp contrast, the following 8 years, (2007 to current) there were four years where four or more mass shootings occurred.  This is a 400% increase over the previous 18 years and if one more mass shooting incident occurs in 2015, the figure will rise to 500%.

Clearly something has changed over the past 8 years that has driven up the number of these mass shootings.  There has not been a 400% increase in gun ownership and gun manufactures are not producing guns that are 400% angrier than they were before.  Our gun laws have not been relaxed by 400% and our nation’s mental health has not deteriorated by 400% in the past 8 years.

It became immediately clear to me that these shootings were irrefutably linked to a societal change.  Liberals are most defenatly barking up the wrong tree in their never ending pursuit to blame these tragedies on weak gun laws and mental health issues.  Mass shootings were hardly a blip on the map until 2007.  Something has shifted which, in more recent years, has begun driving these individuals to their breaking point.

It is time we put an end to the Liberal Democrat’s exploitation of these tragedies and force them to look at the real issue we are facing.  If the President, Pelosi and those who claim to be so passionate about preserving each and every life are truly interested in effecting change, they will move the discussion away from mental health and creating more restrictive gun laws and instead start taking a closer look at what has changed societally, over the past 7-8 years, that is driving these people to their breaking point.

Or, we can keep doing the same thing over and over again and hopes for a different result but we all know what the definition of doing that is!


UPDATE!

Only because Obama mentioned how many mass shootings have taken place on his watch did I decided to go back and look at how many mass shootings have been recorded since 1982.  I used the same Mother Jones source as provided earlier.

Reagan:  8 years in office  -  7 mass shootings

Bush41:  4 years in office  -  7 mass shootings

Clinton:  8 years in office  -  18 mass shootings

Bush43:  8 years in office  -  15 mass shootings

Obama:  6 1/2 years in office  -  25 mass shootings