Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   6/21/2016

                 Not gun control, not lone wolves

Sometimes pictures can, indeed, speak volumes; political cartoons can summarize an issue, at least as the cartoonist sees it. This page, readers may have noticed, often provides images drawn from the perspective of a partisan liberal. A recent one showed apparent legislators ducking under desks and running for the aisles yelling, “He’s got a gun control bill.” Message: Fearful, hysterical aversion to upsetting the NRA drives legislative opposition to “common sense gun safety” laws.

You can read anti-gun drivel in many places, even on the Daily News Opinion page. I saw some political cartoons that provided a balancing reality check. 1) An orange-clothed, bloody headless body lies on the desert sand; next to it is a severed head saying, “Yeah…Guns are the Problem.” Also by Michael Ramirez, 2) showed the actual source of the violence with an illustrated “assault rifle” that has, in place of the bullet-filled magazine, a Koran-like book titled “RADICAL ISLAM.”

3) A giant, black-clothed figure, with “Radical Islam” written on his chest, has a smoking handgun that shot holes in a green “Orlando” city sign. A puny Obama closely examines the bullet-riddled sign for clues saying, “We’re still searching for the motivation.” 4) There’s a black-hooded terrorist with a gun in one hand and a “LAW” book in the other, saying “Let me check the gun laws first.”

5) Text next to national leaders: “ISIS Attacked France, (French President) Hollande Bombed ISIS”; “ISIS Attacked Russia, Putin Bombed ISIS”; “ISIS Attacked the U.S. Obama Blamed the Guns.” 6) Someone re-imagined Paul Revere’s ride as he yells, “The Terrorists are coming! Turn in your guns and go to the gun free zone.” Pictures worth 1,000s of words.

A columnist for PJMedia.com summarized it all too well: “Regarding the Orlando shooting, notice how quickly the media pivoted from the culpability of a sexually repressed Muslim Afghan registered Democrat mass murderer to an assault on firearms? Forget Islam and jihad and the Obama administration’s resolute determination to fundamentally change the nature of the United States by importing as many Muslims from alien, anti-Christian and anti-Western cultures as possible. The real problem, in their view, is gun violence.”

I saw Obama shamelessly pontificating against guns while standing by the memorialized victims of the Orlando gay nightclub, slaughtered by an Islamic terrorist (the descriptor “terrorist” is being scrubbed from news reports, replaced by the agenda-driven “mass shooter”). Obama has heaped scorn, ridicule and anger at the mere suggestion that “Islamic terrorism” be part of his verbiage on the subject. Such scorn, ridicule and anger has never been displayed when he discusses America’s sworn enemies, let alone the Islamic State and Muslim extremist shariah that is preached throughout the Middle East. Its stated goal and desire is conquest of the West under the black flag of the Islamic State.

I left out “Jews” from a sentence last week that should have read: “Christians, Jews, homosexuals and insufficiently observant Muslims are brutally killed every day with knives, rocks, gasoline, drowning, as well as the assisted fall from a high roof.” Consider the attacks: Orlando, San Bernardino, Boston, Fort Hood; the Chattanooga, Tennessee, military base, Bataclan club in Paris (and the Jewish deli), Bombay; and the London Tube massacre.

The commonality? Muslim radicals perpetrated all of them with help from a small but effective network of religious extremists—not by, as Obama would have us believe, “deranged individuals warped by the hateful propaganda that they’ve seen over the Internet.” The killers in the Newtown, Conn. school, and the Aurora, Colo. movie theater, kept their plans very secret from family and friends.

However, all were careful to plan and carry out their rampages in “gun free zones.” FBI wiretaps heard a comment from some would-be jihadists, saying it was crucial to target gun-free places—less likely to get shot. Armed, uniformed guards simply become the first, blind-sided targets; terrorists avoid the likelihood of armed citizens. Look up “Why Terrorists Target Gun-Free Zones,” by John Lott; banning permitted gun owners is a suicidal invitation to terrorists.

Before I forget, in “Border control vs. Gun Control,” John Hinderaker quotes Sen. Jeff Sessions (Rep-Ala), who provides statistics to support Mr. Trump’s suspension or ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries: “The number of green cards issued to migrants from Muslim-majority countries increased dramatically” by nearly 27 percent, to 148,810, from 2013 to 2014. Furthermore, Obama has issued an annual average of almost 140,000 green cards to such migrants, which will total a likely 1.1 million for his term. “A green card entitles recipients to access federal benefits, lifetime residency, work authorization, and a direct route to becoming a U.S. citizen.” Have you ever voted for such policies? Has Congress? No!

The New York Post published a column by Paul Sperry, “Why the ‘lone-wolf’ terrorist is a myth.” He is the author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington” and “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” His piece makes an irrefutable case, from public and FBI reports, that—in the cases of terrorists Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez (Chattanooga, Tenn. military base), Syed Farook (San Bernardino), Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Boston), and Omar Mateen (Orlando)—they had both family and fellow mosque-attending associates supporting, aware of, and helping their plots.