Someone has to say it

Ross Zimmerman, whose son Gabe was murdered in the recent Tucson tragedy, is now being heartlessly used as a poster boy by the execrable Michael Bloomberg's "Mayors Against Illegal Guns" campaign to lobby for "reasonable" gun control measures.  Unfortunately for him (and them), though, Zimmerman has no earthly idea about what exactly he's supposed to be advocating for:

"'I'm not educated on the details of the gun laws,' he told HuffPost on Monday, 'but there are some things that are pretty obvious, like background checks.'"  (emphasis ours)

We are truly saddened by and sympathetic to that father's unimaginable loss, but once a person attempts to milk a personal tragedy for political reasons he or she becomes fair game for criticism.

Perhaps Mr. Zimmerman should get some knowledge on the subject before he begins agitating for yet more useless laws that would not have stopped his son's murderer that day.  Otherwise he becomes just another Rep. Carolyn "The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up" McCarthy (D-NY), a person similarly (and regrettably, of course) affected by gun violence who somehow feels that sad fact gives her a free license to not bother to "educate" herself about items and products about which she knows nothing except that they somehow "look" evil to her, which then becomes her sole reason for trying to deny ownership of them to law-abiding individuals:



As everyone with a smidgen of factual knowledge about the incident knows, the cowardly shooter Loughner before his horrific act was an individual who had neither a criminal record nor a mental-health diagnosis that would have disqualified him from any sort of background check, including the very one he passed when purchasing his firearm.  How would subjecting law-abiding individuals to yet another unnecessary government intrusion (a double-background check?) into their lives have prevented the massacre?  One simply cannot prevent every bad thing in the world from happening.  That's the price of living in a free society.

"[Zimmerman] said he hoped the rally would help address the need to create programs in Tucson that help gun sellers identify mentally unstable individuals."

He (and by extension the shills who are cynically using him) apparently believes that gun-store owners now have to be licensed as interventional psychiatrists before being allowed to open their doors.  Isn't the federal government, by the way, the very entity that, through its cumbersome HIPAA law, made such health records so very hard for anyone to access without a direct doctor-patient relationship or a signed waiver from the patient?  Unintended consequences, indeed.

"'It was a diverse group of people who got shot ... so families are grieving in diverse ways,' [Zimmerman] said."

We're extremely sorry, but we simply fail to see what such meaningless PC pap has to do with the debate at hand.