NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE: Democrats Turn Atrocity Into Political Ammunition

By Matthew Vadum

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly savage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a Muslim terrorist atrocity.

The president described the attack as "an act of pure evil."

Nowadays there should be a working assumption – or perhaps a rebuttable presumption is a better way of putting it – that when a terrorist-style attack like this happens, jihadists are behind it either directly or indirectly. It is important to note that videos produced by Islamic State (also called ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh), specifically show the Las Vegas Strip, presenting the area as a prospective terrorist target.

The rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire rang out while country music performer Jason Aldean was on stage on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night singing at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the massacre that was carried out several football fields away from a two-bedroom suite on the 32^nd floor of MGM’s Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino by 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who killed himself before police could apprehend him.

Relatives say the shooter kept to himself and wasn’t prone to angry outbursts. Described as a retired accountant turned professional gambler, Paddock owned several homes around the country. His brother said he was a “multi-millionaire.” He apparently owned an apartment complex in Texas.

The brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters that Paddock had no religious or political affiliations or history of mental illness. “He just hung out,” the brother added, leaving out the fact that the father of the two men, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a violent psychopath who was on the FBI’s most wanted list.

Witnesses say a woman attended the concert and told people that they were all going to die that night. Sky News interviewed a concert-goer identified only as Brianna who said the incident happened about 45 minutes before gunfire broke out.

Former Chicago Police superintendent Garry McCarthy told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that it is too early to rule out terrorism as Paddock’s motivation. “I’m not ready to dismiss the terrorism angle here until we find out for sure that that’s not the case because it certainly was executed like a terrorist operation, even though this guy, Paddock, doesn’t fit the profile.”

The extensive, meticulous planning and preparation required for this attack makes it very hard to believe a lone wolf was behind it. Merely getting all the materiel to his hotel suite would have required dragging a caravan of suitcases or boxes filled with heavy weapons and thousands upon thousands of live rounds through the casino grounds replete with eye-in-the-sky security cameras without arousing suspicion in a place where management views everyone, including employees, as potential cheats. The hauling operation could have taken days.

That the shooter apparently had fully automatic weapons, that is, firearms that fire continuously, eating up vast quantities of ammunition, is significant. Such weapons, referred to in federal law as “machine guns,” are extremely difficult and expensive to obtain. Owners are subjected to far-reaching, intrusive background checks at the federal level by ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It is also possible that the weapons used were illegally modified to allow continuous fire.

Anyone who follows the news knows that Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On August 23 authorities in Rotterdam in the Netherlands foiled a suspected Muslim terrorist attack that was to take place during a performance by Allah-Las at the Maassilo concert complex. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault.

At time of writing, there were 59 dead and 527 injured in Las Vegas. The body count surpasses the previous grim record of 49 killed and 58 wounded during the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016. The gunman in Orlando was a 29-year-old Muslim, Omar Mateen, who pledged allegiance to Islamic State during the attack and was later killed by police. As with Paddock, Islamic State claimed responsibility for Mateen’s actions.

While the crime scene in Las Vegas was still being investigated and victims were fighting for their lives in hospitals, angry left-wingers were celebrating the deaths of concert attendees whom they assumed were country music-loving Republicans. President Trump, by the way, lost Nevada in the election to Democrat Hillary Clinton by almost two-and-a-half percentage points.

As for Hillary, the yet-to-be-indicted failed former secretary of state started her day yesterday making nonsensical statements indicating she doesn’t understand guns and how they work, not to mention physics.

“The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots,” Clinton tweeted Monday at 10:03 a.m. “Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.”

But if Paddock had used a silencer, also called a suppressor, on the barrels of his rifles his murder spree would have ended soon after it got underway. This is because a metal silencer on a continuous-fire weapon would have quickly deformed or melted from the intense heat generated. Anyone who has ever fired a rifle knows that even an ordinary rifle is loud. The powerful weapons Paddock used are much louder. It is somewhere between impossible and very unlikely that a silencer would have muffled the extraordinarily loud sound of a machine gun.

After making a fool out of herself, at 10:04 a.m. she tweeted, “Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.” Of course, demonizing the NRA and its millions of Second Amendment-supporting members isn’t actually putting politics aside – it’s putting politics front and center and spotlighting them with klieg lights.

A senior media company executive easily outdid Mrs. Clinton in sheer vileness and moral depravity.

Hayley Geftman-Gold, vice president and senior counsel, strategic transactions, at CBS Corp., did a happy dance on the mangled corpses of her fellow Americans because in her view they probably voted for Donald Trump last November.

In a Facebook post she blamed Republicans for the deaths in Las Vegas because they won’t endorse stronger gun control. She wrote, “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered” — apparently a reference to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, “I have no hope that Repugs [sic] will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even sympathetic [because] country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

As Amelia Hamilton notes at Truth Revolt, Geftman-Gold, a graduate of Columbia Law School, “is a highly-educated woman with a prestigious position saying that she doesn’t care that people are dead because of their political affiliation.”

Frighteningly, “[t]his is not a radical political affiliation, one that calls for murder or violence,” Hamilton writes. “It is a mainstream political opinion held by roughly half of the country.”

Although Geftman-Gold’s ugly opinions are no doubt far from unusual within the CBS family, the broadcasting company did damage control by promptly firing her, explaining that “her views as expressed on social media are deeply unacceptable to all of us at CBS. Our hearts go out to the victims in Las Vegas and their families.”

Twitter user @cryingcassie was more specific in her remarks than Geftman-Gold.

With a photo of singer Mariah Carey flipping her hand dismissively, she tweeted, "Me finding out it was a Las Vegas country concert so they were probably all trump supporters[.]"

"I honestly want every single trump supporter dead,” she added. “This isn't a tweet for attention. If you support trump I want you 6 feet in the ground." At time of writing, Twitter had not suspended her account.

On cue the Left is using the massacre to demand more gun control measures that wouldn’t make America safer. Their allies, the clueless celebrities of America, took to Twitter to weigh in on stuff they lack the intellectual capacity to understand.

Rap music magnate and Occupy Wall Street supporter Russell Simmons tweeted, “I will also do everything in my power to get Congress to pass comprehensive gun reform so these types of tragedies don’t happen anymore.”

Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “Sensible gun control NOW.”

Jeffrey Wright, who plays CIA operative Felix Leiter in James Bond movies: “The f***’s the argument from @NRA & the @DLoesch-types? Arm yourself at concerts w/ .50-cals., Kevlar & night-vision googles? IGNORANCE!!!”

Actress Elizabeth Banks stupidly opined, “It would be wise to ban assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and silencers. None of which is excessive.”

Lady Gaga at least acknowledged the attack constituted terrorism as she pushed gun-grabbing. “This is terrorism plain and simple. Terror bares [sic] no race, no gender or religion. Democrats & Republicans please unite now #guncontrol[.]”

The same left-wingers who urge that no one rush to judgment and point a finger at Muslims when a violent attack that looks like an act of terrorism happens, spewed racist venom yesterday as soon as they learned the Las Vegas shooter was a white man.

Comedy writer Megan Amram reacted to a TMZ story that Paddock didn’t fit the typical mass-shooter profile by tweeting, “White man? Sure does.” TMZ’s report stated that Paddock was too old at 64, resided in a retirement community, and had no criminal history.

“If only there was a way to have known he was going to use that rifle for assault,” Amram tweeted. She followed it up with, “Trump, please ban Americans from traveling to the United States. They are far too dangerous to let in.”

Trotskyist journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “Everyone knows (even if won't admit it) that in the early stages of mass shooting, ‘no signs of terrorism’ means: ‘shooter isn't Muslim.’”

Marxist Twitter troll George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, had his gleeful responses to tragedy ready to go.

"It's the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid[,]" the America-hater tweeted. “Here's a wild idea: white supremacy in the U.S. is a bipartisan project, & *both* the gun lobby *and* the anti-gun lobby are racist as f***[,]” he added.

Race-obsessed leftist buffoon Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s “chief political correspondent,” is an expert at finding racism where it does not exist. At 4:45 a.m. yesterday he tweeted, “That Las Vegas authorities have ruled out terrorism at this early stage is another example of how the idea has all but been racialized.” Then he elaborated, tweeting, “Essentially, by the definition currently in common currency, a white person cannot be a terrorist.”

While Americans mourn the victims of this likely terrorist attack, left-wingers pour salt on the nation’s wounds. It looks like it’s going to be that way for a long time to come.

Read more at FrontpageMag.com.