If Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has his way, prospective brides will no longer say “I do,” at the altar, but rather, “I don’t. I’d rather marry a terrorist.”
The knee-jerk defender of all things politically to the left titled his Saturday column, “Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists.”
Of course, plenty of terrorists are married, but that’s beside the point.
Kristof posits that President Trump’s attempts to protect the American people are misguided, and instead he should focus on husbands with guns. He writes:
Consider two critical issues: refugees and guns. Trump is going berserk over the former, but wants to ease rules on the latter. So let’s look at the relative risks. In the four decades between 1975 and 2015, terrorists born in the seven nations in Trump’s travel ban killed zero people in America, according to the Cato Institute. Zero.In that same period, guns claimed 1.34 million lives in America, including murders, suicides and accidents.
He confesses, “It’s true that Muslim Americans — both born in the United States and immigrants from countries other than those subject to Trump’s restrictions — have carried out deadly terrorism in America. There have been 123 such murders since the 9/11 attacks,” then adds, “— and 230,000 other murders.”
Then the attack on the American male: “The bottom line is that most years in the U.S., ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning. Above all, fear spouses: Husbands are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists.
How much worse are American men than men from other countries? “In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves.”
Kristof then embarks on an odyssey through all the ways conservatives have fought against gun control before concluding, “With his travel ban, Trump is peddling an ineffective policy that is morally repugnant, even as he marches toward a looser policy on guns likely to result in more school shootings, more shattered families and more lives lost. Those graves will last long after Trump’s tweets are gone.”
If ever a terrorist comes to Kristof’s door, or happens to meet him at his day job, Kristof may want to rethink his staunch opposition to guns.
In the meantime, as one American husband, I have two words for Kristof saying I’m more dangerous than a terrorist. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College; he should be able to figure out what they are.