After the horrific Las Vegas massacre last October 1, in which a staggering 58 people were murdered and 851 people wounded, internecine warfare broke out in the Democratic Party as to whether to take advantage of the tragedy by politicizing the issue or remaining silent.
On Tuesday the Huffington Post reported that the morning after the Las Vegas massacre, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s regional press secretary Evan Lukaske wrote to candidates in the Northeast not to “politicize” the shooting.
Lukaske wrote:
Teams—last night’s shooting will dominate the news today, and will garner serious coverage the rest of the week. You and your candidate will be understandably outraged and upset, as will your community. However, DO NOT POLITICIZE IT TODAY. There will be time for politics and policy discussion, but any message today should be on offering thoughts/prayers for victims and their families, and thanking 1st responders who saved lives. I’d recommend tweeting little today, and, if possible, holding any press hits for the rest of the week.
Predictably, gun control activists reacted with fury that the Democrats were not taking advantage of the tragedy to push for harsher gun control; Ladd Everitt, director of One Pulse for America, called the DCCC email “pathetic.” Mark Glaze, senior advisor to the group Guns Down, said the email was “straight out of the NRA’s talking points … If the DCCC is willing to give up a key issue and offend virtually every Democrat so as not to bother eight Independents in rural Missouri, they’re even more incompetent than we thought, and Democrats should be very worried about the midterms.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a strident voice advocating harsher gun control at virtually all times, ignored the email, and tweeted, “To my colleagues: your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers.” Former Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband, retired Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, joined Murphy by appearing at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to demand action.
Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the hard-Left Justice Democrats, called Lukaske’s email “a slap in the face to the movement” against gun violence.