Wednesday morning the nation awakened to yet another mass shooting. We can expect the usual NRA apologists to begin sending out their “thoughts and prayers,” while doing their best to obstruct any constructive reforms. But we could not possibly have expected that Fox News would feature an “expert” law enforcement analyst speculating that mass shootings were somehow linked to the COVID-19 vaccine. Could we?
Never mind that Fox News and the Republican Party have laid out an agenda that calls for less voting and more guns. And set aside that their proposed solution to the epidemic of mass shootings is to initiate “Idiot Control.”
In the course of breaking news coverage of yet another active shooter incident, this one in San Jose, California, Fox’s Harris Faulkner invited retired NYPD detective Pat Brosnan to provide his analysis fo the situation. Brosnan began with a bizarre commentary on the “Summer of Love of 2020” (presumably a facetious reference to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations), but then launched into this bit of brain-damaged commentary (video below):
“Crimes are no longer illegal. There’s no longer an enforcement of lots of laws. And there’s an empowerment of these active shooters.”
Say what? Needless to say, those deranged observations were not supported by any coherent discussion of how, precisely, crimes ceased to be illegal or active shooters have been “empowered.” But Brosnan was just getting started:
“Once COVID starts to lift, these cowardly shooters will come out exactly in tandem with the number of vaccinations. You can be sure they probably got vaccinated. They were just scared to come out. And they’re coming back, and you can see the numbers don’t lie. The shootings are up dramatically. Skyrocketing, actually, on active shootings throughout the United States as we’ve come through this pandemic. It’s really terrifying stuff.”
Brosnan was speaking out of a bodily orifice that is significantly below his mouth. His speculation about shooters having been vaccinated is pure fantasy and utterly insane. There’s a vague insinuation in there that the vaccine is turning otherwise ordinary people into mass murderers. The reality, of course, is that it’s the unvaccinated who are more likely to cause deaths by furthering the transmission of the coronavirus and its variants.
What’s more, there is no evidence whatsoever of mass shootings in the United States occurring “in tandem with vaccinations.” If anything, it was the administration of Donald Trump that produced a spike in gun violence. And Brosnan wants you believe that shooters were too “scared to come out,” but not too scared to grab a gun and shoot people with the certain knowledge that the police will show up and shoot back. If there was a decline in mass shootings in the past year, it wasn’t because the shooters were too scared to come out. It was because their potential victims were.
This is another example of Fox News trying desperately to muddle the discourse on an issue that their right-wing, ammosexual, GOP patrons are too scared to face honestly. They have no rational arguments to support their gun worship, or to deal with the fact that the vast majority of the American people support the reforms proposed by Democrats. So they fling rhetorical feces in an effort to numb the minds of their dimwitted viewers. Which really shouldn’t take much effort at all. And as always, now will not be the right time to talk about reform.
UPDATE: The Los Angeles times is now reporting that the gunman “set his own house on fire before he drove to a Valley Transportation Authority union meeting and began shooting.” Also, “Sources said the suspect is believed to have killed himself after the mass shooting.” So he really fits the profile of someone who was concerned about getting vaccinated to keep from catching a deadly virus, huh?
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This seems like a weird takeaway from the San Jose mass shooting.
Retired NYPD detective Pat Brosnan on Fox News: "Once covid starts to lift, these cowardly shooters will come out exactly in tandem with the number of vaccinations. You can be sure they probably got vaccinated." pic.twitter.com/XfZL4JgsBW
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 26, 2021
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
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