If we accept the argument that opposition, even heated opposition, to a given person or policy is responsible for violent crimes against those associated with those persons or policies, we have to acknowledge that any opposition to anything is responsible for any crime anyone commits. If some lunatic attacks a gay it's presumably because some people oppose gay marriage, if another lunatic attacks a scientist it's because some people are skeptical of climate change. This is a very convenient tactic because it pretty much shuts down unwelcome dissent. If people disagree with the president their disagreement just encourages the psychos out there to launch an assault on the White House so it's irresponsible to disagree with the president. Very clever.
It only works one way, though. No one on the Left, for instance, would ever dream of connecting the Black Lives Matter supporters parading down the street in St. Paul, Minnesota chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" to the murders by other blacks of white cops: Jim Geraghty makes this point in a column at National Review. He writes:
Let me get this straight. In the eyes of the Left criticism of Planned Parenthood means something like the shooting in Colorado “was bound to happen" but chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon’ doesn’t lead to attacks on police.If you're unfamiliar with Geraghty's references you can find links to each of them in his column. The point is that just as the liberal media goes on endlessly about the alleged prevarications of Donald Trump and Ben Carson but never applies the same criticism to the manifestly dishonest claims of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, they also seize on tragedies like that at PP and use it as a cudgel with which to pummel their political foes while completely ignoring the "incendiary rhetoric" on their own side.
When an event by Pamela Geller is targeted by an Islamist shooter, it is “not really about [Geller's right to] free speech; it was an exercise in [her] bigotry and hatred” and the attempt to kill her means she has “achieved her provocative goal” while at the same time, investigators contend we may never know what motivated a 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez to kill four Marines and a sailor in an attack on Chattanooga’s U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center last July.
A shooting by a diagnosed schizophrenic, who believed that grammar was part of a vast, government-directed mind control effort, is characterized by the Southern Poverty law Center as having views that are the “hallmark of the far right and the militia movement” while the shooter who opened fire in the lobby of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington in 2012, who planned to target the Traditional Values Coalition next, does not spur any need for a broader discussion or societal lessons about the demonization of political opponents.
A California killer, who was treated by multiple therapists and already had police checking on him after posting disturbing YouTube videos, is a reflection of “sexist society,” but there’s little reason to ask whether the Oregon shooter’s decision to target Christians reflects a broader, societal hostility to Christians, or whether it reflects his personal allegiance to demons.
When white supremacist Dylann Roof committed an act of mass murder in an African-American church, Salon declares “White America is complicit” and the Washington Post runs a column declaring, “99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does", but the Roanoke shooter’s endless sense of grievance and perceptions of racism and homophobia in all of his coworkers represents him and him alone.
Do I have all that right? And does that make sense to anyone?
This bias is worsened by the fact that there seems to be a much clearer correlation between the murders of cops and the revolting chants of the the marchers who call for them to be "fried like bacon" than there is between Robert Dear's mutterings about "baby body parts" and anything anyone morally aghast at the incriminating PP videos has said.
