Within minutes of Monday’s report of an “active shooter” at Ohio State University, social media was flooded with posts about gun control. It wasn’t simply the liberal twitterverse pushing the narrative, it was high-profile Democratic politicians and activists:
Deeply saddened by the senseless act of gun violence at Ohio State this morning. Praying for the injured and the entire Buckeye community
— Senator Tim Kaine (@timkaine) November 28, 2016
Other nations protect their students. America gives dangerous people guns and asks students to defend themselves. Ohio State University https://t.co/8Lk2A6SKFi
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) November 28, 2016
This is where were are. Instead of common sense gun control, we get “run, hide, fight.” https://t.co/b5tpDDauWc
— Julie DiCaro (@JulieDiCaro) November 28, 2016
California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom even tweeted about gun control, writing: “My thoughts are w/Ohio State this AM. We cannot let an average of 1 school shooting/wk be the normal in America. Too many lives are at stake.” However, when the news broke that the incident didn’t involve a gun, he deleted the tweet, and replaced it with the following:
With the use of a knife & car the OSU attack has devastated victims’ lives. My thoughts are with those in the ER recovering & their families https://t.co/DvdBX9ajUZ
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 28, 2016
As a result of the hysteria, #GunControl became a trending topic on Twitter. Social media was on fire. Once it was revealed that the attacker was not a gunman, but a middle-eastern man who used his car and a knife as weapons, the fervor died down rather quickly. Aside from Newsom, Tim Kaine and the activists quoted above didn’t delete their tweets.
This behavior is intentional. This is a “first to the flag” scenario in which whomever is first to grab the attention of social media users wins. No one remembers who came in second. Despite no hard evidence having been relayed–simply a generalized and unsubstantiated report of an “active shooter” on the Ohio State campus–progressives leapt at the chance to spread gun control propaganda.
Fewer people will see the retractions, or tweets clarifying what really happened. What they’ll remember most is “another shooting on campus.” If they do discover the truth via the news or other media, the notion of gun control will still be swimming in their minds.
There’s a scene from the film Doubt in which Father Flynn, portrayed brilliantly by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, delivers a sermon on gossip.
A woman goes to confession, and she tells the priest that she’s been gossiping, so the priest tells her to go home, take a feather pillow to the roof of her apartment building, and cut it open. He instructs her to return to confession the next day.
The woman returns to the priest the next day, as instructed, and he asks her what happened when she gutted the pillow. “Feathers, father.” The wind picked up hundreds and hundreds of feathers from the pillow, scattering them for miles. The priest then told the women to go back and retrieve every one of the lost feathers. “It can’t be done. I don’t know where they went,” the woman said. “That is gossip,” Hoffman’s character shouts.
This is what the Left did. They rushed to the roof (social media), cut open the pillow, and scattered misinformation. The act of spreading misinformation cannot be fully undone. It can be partially corrected, but having been picked up by the wind of social media, those feathers can never be retrieved.
It’s a soft-brainwashing–an excuse to talk about gun control regardless of the circumstances, and feed the narrative of the anti-gun lobby. This behavior is necessary because progressives don’t have the facts on their side. All they have is misinformation, which must be disseminated frequently and deliberately so as to saturate the airwaves, and drown out any rebuttal.
Moreover, gun control gives progressives a shield if the attacker is a jihadist. In order to avoid talking about the cancerous ideology of radical Islam, they can divert the attention of the American people toward firearms.
Unfortunately for progressives, the attacker was a Muslim without a gun–a combination with which they have difficulty.
If Abdul Razak Ali Artan had used a gun, we would have been treated to a tearful but stern press conference by President Obama regarding “senseless gun violence,” as well as breathless commentary from Democratic politicians and media pundits. Instead, President Obama has gone more than 24 hours without even mentioning the attack–either in a press event or on social media–and the pundits are gliding along without thundering commentary.