Donald Trump finds a new way to embarrass himself
So, now that Donald Trump has come up with a solution to our gun violence woes after listening to the Parkland shooting survivors yesterday—fight guns with guns, just like in the Old West—he has decided to also go retro on what causes gun violence in the first place. See, in the nineties the hot topic was violence in video games. It was believed by enough people to merit an argument back then that individuals who played such video games eventually mimicked what they saw in such games.
This was a subject of many an improvised speech arguing either side of the issue in my English and Speech classes.
Needless to say, blaming video games for mass shootings in 2018, a week after 17 people lost their lives in one, is not only deflection, it is asinine when it doesn’t take much research to find that the common denominator in all of these shootings is the guns and/or the ease with which weapons of war are obtainable by civilians.
For the president of the United States in 2018 to recycle a long-expired argument about what causes violence, and one that we grew tired of hearing back in the nineties, barely a day after meeting with Parkland shooting survivors, is further testament to how little interest our president has in protecting us.
You could almost shrug this indifference off as just the nature of this particular beast, but you can’t, because we’re not even dealing with a beast here—not even traumatized children all but pleading for their lives to his face fazed him. Instead, we are dealing with a businessman whose highest roller is the NRA.
Reem is a freelance editor and writer in Denver who is outraged by the current state of things.