There's a peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance that exists in the Democratic Party, and it shows up every time a shooting happens. They’re too busy trying to exploit shootings for political gain to care about solving the actual problem. They refuse to acknowledge the mental health crisis behind the problem. They would sooner focus on making guns the bad guys before anything else. Arm people for protection? Forget it. In their eyes, no mass shooting has ever been stopped by a good guy with a gun.
Democrats have been wrong about this for decades. And this week, in a synagogue outside Detroit, reality came crashing through the door — literally — to prove it once again.
On Thursday, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old Lebanese-born migrant, drove a truck through the entrance of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. By now, you’ve heard the synagogue has a school, and even though Ghazali exited the vehicle armed with a rifle, no kids were hurt. Security guards engaged him and neutralized him.
Ironically, Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin both appeared at a Friday press conference to praise the armed security response.
"I just want to reiterate, I think it's clear that if it were not for the private security and the staff at Temple Israel and then the first responders first on the scene, local law enforcement, if they had not all done their jobs almost perfectly, we would be talking about an immense tragedy here today with children gone," Slotkin said Friday. "This could have been much, much worse, so I give incredible credit to law enforcement and the people who were in the room."
It’s great that she said this, but don’t expect Democrats to connect the dots back to their own party's record.
Because the record is damning.
After the Uvalde, Parkland, and Newtown tragedies, Democrats didn't push for armed security in schools; they pushed for the same old gun bans that don’t solve the problem. They go after the guns.
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For example, after the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tenn., Maryland Democrats attacked Tennessee for responding by passing laws that allowed armed teachers. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen called it "a misguided and dangerous approach that undermines the safety and well-being of both students and educators." Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe dismissed the entire concept of armed school security.
“It shows the myth behind this idea that if we get more heavily armed and, you know, more police and be in more places quicker, that we are going to stop this,” McCabe claimed. “Law enforcement alone cannot solve this problem.”
It was ironic that he actually made the case for armed civilian responders without realizing it.
Democrats can’t fathom the idea that there is such a thing as good guys with guns. More often than not, they want us to rely on law enforcement, who typically can’t respond quickly enough to save lives.
It would be nice to believe that, since Slotkin said that, without armed security, "we would be talking about an immense tragedy here today with children gone,” that Democrats would realize that this is a better way to respond than disarming the public.
But they won’t.
