Glocks and such: Phony outrage is well-worn shoe in US

Posted: Monday, September 5, 2011 12:00 am
A gun, by any other name, is just a gun. Unless it's a Glock semi-automatic pistol raffled off by Republicans in Pima County, which just happens to be the same county where Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people were shot, six of them killed.

Then it's an outrage.

Or so we're supposed to believe.

The 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse erupted last week when Huffington Post pointed out that the Pima County Republican Party was raffling off a Glock 23 pistol, saying it's the same pistol that Jared Lee Loughner used Jan. 8 to shoot Giffords in the head.

It's not the same. Loughner used a Glock 19.

Liberals immediately decided it was an affront to Giffords and the others shot that day and dubbed it an insensitive outrage, yet it's legal to purchase and own a gun in the United States and it's legal to raffle a gun in Arizona.

The politics of outrage is a well-worn shoe in America. One pol or another is always trying to fan the flames of outrage to gin up votes. It works so well that we're constantly barraged with outrages to the point that we're permanently outraged.

In a country where everyone is outraged, no one is. Yet there are some things happening in this country we should be angry about and one of them is our inability to come to terms with the Second Amendment.

Consider the fake fury by conservatives over the ATF Fast and Furious scandal, an attempted sting operation by federal agents who allowed "straw buyers" to legally purchase thousands of assault rifles from Arizona gun dealers so that the guns could be tracked to Mexican drug cartels. The ATF lost track of many of the guns and one of those guns ended up at the shooting scene where smugglers killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Conservatives say they are outraged about it and are desperately trying to pin the scandal on President Obama.

But in the three years prior to Operation Fast and Furious, several newspapers had written investigative stories about Mexican drug cartels smuggling tens of thousands of legally purchased American guns into Mexico.

Rather than be outraged by that fact, conservatives saw the stories as an insidious attack on the Second Amendment by attempting to conflate Mexico's drug war with America's gun laws. And that was outrageous, they said.

Thousands of Mexicans getting slaughtered with those American guns was not an outrage. Until a Democratic administration tried to do something about it and blew it. Then it was.

Since the Loughner shooting, people using guns of various makes, types and calibers have killed about two dozen people in Pima County.

Are Democrats outraged by that? Or are they only outraged when Republicans try to raise money raffling off a gun made by the same manufacturer of a gun used to shoot a Democrat?

By the way, Giffords owns a Glock.

Where's the outrage?
For a longer version of this editorial, go to http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/.