A Man and His Squirrel

Just 2 days before the New York Times published its unusual front page editorial calling for more gun control, the old Gray Lady ran this Op-Ed piece questioning the “mass shootings” statistics thrown around by “news” publications like the Washington Post and, uh…the New York Times:

On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.

It should be noted that the author, Mark Follman, is an editor at Mother Jones. And needless to say, when a Mother Jones editor questions your “mass shootings” statistics, you have a serious credibility problem.

What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others.

I see we don’t have an official “definition” for “terrorism” either – homegrown or otherwise - at least not one that Barry, Valarie, Loretta and the FBI can all agree on.

Misguided comic book characters, committing acts of shenanigans

Butt never mind all that stuff. Forget the mess we made of the Arab Spring, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran, disregard the rise of the JV team, stop worrying about the invasion of “vetted” foreigners to our shores. Big Guy is addressing the nation tonight and expect him to be more animated than usual because he’s really upset with all of you rubes who refuse to buy his common sense approach to terrorism and homegrown terrorists:

“Hey rubes! Pay attention, I’m lecturing you!” (h/t: Blonde Gator)