This past week, Parkland, Florida, became the scene of the nation’s latest mass shooting when a disgruntled former student returned to the school they’d been expelled from and opened fire, killing 17 people.
In the aftermath of that shooting — which is hardly the first of its kind — calls have unsurprisingly increased for America’s leaders to implement common sense gun control. The weapon that the Parkland shooter used has been used in an array of prominent mass shooting incidents in recent years, and yet even still, America’s GOP leadership has done nothing.
In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the president has opted to scapegoat both Parkland community members and mentally ill people as a whole.
Now, the president has a new excuse for his inaction on the need for implementing common sense gun control.
He took to Twitter late Saturday to claim that since the Democrats didn’t pass gun control legislation during the two years at the beginning of President Obama’s administration during which they controlled both elected branches of government, their commitment to the concept isn’t as strong as they claim. By extension, Trump seems to imply that he shouldn’t be expected to fulfill the “fool’s errand” of imposing common sense gun control.
He wrote:
‘Just like they don’t want to solve the DACA problem, why didn’t the Democrats pass gun control legislation when they had both the House & Senate during the Obama Administration. Because they didn’t want to, and now they just talk!’
Note how he doesn’t mention the fact that Democrats had control of both elected branches of government for only about two years.
During that time — one that’s markedly shorter than Trump allows for here — Democrats didn’t just sit around doing nothing.
The Affordable Care Act, for instance, was signed into law on March 23, 2010, right in the middle of the two years during which Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House.
President Trump is, of course, well aware of this fact; he simply prefers to ignore it since it could cast further scrutiny onto his longstanding but struggling efforts to repeal the ACA and thereby strip health coverage from the millions of people who have benefited from the ACA in recent years.
Besides the ACA, Democrats in Congress also passed the well known, massive stimulus economic stimulus package back in the beginning of 2009.
Although the package was controversial on both sides of the political spectrum, it began an economic policy program executed by President Obama that set the American economy on the path to the generally positive state it’s in presently, which President Trump routinely and wrongfully takes full credit for.
On top of these things, it’s not as though the president himself has shown any inclination towards implementing common sense gun control, so he’s in no position to speak to the commitment to such a cause on the part of Democrats, who regularly speak in favor of such a thing.
His latest tweet is a slap in the face to not just Democrats but also to the survivors of the Parkland shooting, many of whom have been vocal with calls for gun control in the wake of the atrocity. Some survivors joined a Saturday rally in Fort Lauderdale calling for increased gun control.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president below.
Featured Image via Olivier Douliery- Pool/ Getty Images
