OPINION:
Just when you thought the rhetoric surrounding gun control couldn’t get any more hyperbolic — here comes Michael Moore, out of Hollywood’s left field of fantasy dwellers.
“The NRA,” Moore wrote on Twitter, “is a terrorist organization.”
How so?
Well, he went on, it’s like ISIS — just like the dang ISIS.
“The media should speak of the NRA in the same way they do of ISIS,” he wrote — and on second thought, hmm, listen up conservatives, maybe that’d be a good thing for Second Amendment supporters, given the tendency of some in the media to actually excuse ISIS for its terrorism acts and justify jihadists’ behaviors by pointing fingers at American policies. Maybe speaking of the NRA along the same vein as ISIS would be a step up in media land …
Anyhoooo ….
“Total ISIS-inspired deaths in US = 79,” Moore wrote. “Thanks to the NRA & the politicians they buy, we’ve made it easy for anyone to have as many guns as the[y] wants — and the result has been 1.2 MILLION American gun deaths since John Lennon was shot dead in NYC. #NRAKillsKids.”
Nice. The NRA kills kids — the guns kill kids, so Moore says. But how come the criminals are never the ones killing kids, at least in the minds of the far left?
Moore ought to have mentioned, too, the gun deaths in America, of which FiveThirtyEight puts at more than 33,000 per year, are due in large part to suicide, in large part to homicide and in lesser part to accidents.
From the survey site: “More than 33,000 people are fatally shot in the U.S. each year. … [N]early two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. … Another third of all gun deaths — about 12,000 in total each year — are homicides.”
How is this ISIS, which kills for religious reasons?
And how is the NRA, an organization aimed at upholding rights that are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, akin to the murderous (read: illegally so) Islamic jihadist group, ISIS?
It’s not, of course.
Moore’s rhetoric is off-the-charts radical. But let’s remember: His point of view is shared by plenty of others on the left, in the Democratic Party, in the media and in positions of policy and influence.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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