OPINION:
Monday was another sad and somber day in America: yet another school shooting.
An emotionally disturbed young woman — who was said to have been transitioning into a man — snapped. She smashed into a Christian school she once attended, armed with three guns (she owned seven in all), including at least one semi-automatic rifle. She killed three students and three adults before she was fatally shot by police.
A quick aside: Politicians continually prove that they’re incapable of solving America’s gun violence problem. Both sides lay out specious arguments for and against guns, and then they wander off to spout violent rhetoric at each other about abortions for 12-year-olds and whether drag queens should be strutting for 8-year-olds.
But back to Monday. Every parent in America who saw the wall-to-wall TV coverage of Nashville had the same thought: Those poor children. Even though most didn’t know the three children shot to death in a hail of bullets, every mom and dad felt what those parents were feeling — the sudden, senseless loss of life, lives cut down far too soon.
And every parent likely had the same thought, too: Take me, not my child. Every parent would gladly lay down their lives for their children.
That’s what officers with the Nashville Police Department were ready to do: die to save others in distress — complete strangers. In extraordinary video from two officers’ bodycams, the officers wasted no time (unlike what the cowards in Uvalde, Texas, did, waiting 45 minutes to enter). “Let’s go!” one Nashville cop said less than a minute after arriving, and in they went. One misstep would have meant death.
Like the brave 9/11 first responders, they went into the unknown.
Enter President Biden. He’s commander in chief, but one of his most important jobs is consoler in chief. When bad stuff happens, the president is there. Remember 9/11? Three days later, President George W. Bush gave what would turn out to be his most famous address. Out in the street, standing next to a firefighter, no one could hear Mr. Bush’s words, so rescue workers yelled back, “We can’t hear you!”
Mr. Bush grabbed a bullhorn and ad-libbed: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Goose bumps.
So what did Mr. Biden do after Monday’s deadly attack? Here’s exactly what he said, according to the official White House transcript, in his first comments just after an emotionally disturbed transsexual murdered three children and three adults.
“Thank you. My name is Joe Biden. (Laughter.) I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. (Laughter.) And I eat Jeni’s Ice Cream, chocolate chip. (Laughter.) I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream. (Laughter.) By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs. (Laughter.) You think I’m kidding? I’m not.”
Mr. Biden went on rambling, working the crowd like a bad stand-up comedian. Eventually, he got around to what he does best: politicizing tragedies.
“We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation — ripping at the very soul of the nation. And we — we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons. You know, the shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol — two AK-47s. So I call on Congress, again, to pass my assault weapons ban. It’s about time that we begin to make some more progress,” the president said.
And then Mr. Biden’s brain just wandered off to Nagaland. “And one of the things you folks should — I know you do know, but you should focus on — you know, just like when — in the military — when my son was in Iraq for a year, other places, you — there’s so many members of the military coming back with post-traumatic stress after witnessing the violence and participating in it.”
Huh?
Mr. Biden isn’t up to the job of commander in chief. He can’t even handle consoler in chief. And while guns — especially weapons that can fire multiple rounds per second — are too easily obtained in America, don’t look for politicians to solve our country’s endemic violence problem.
Like so many others, this was a mental health problem.
And it doesn’t help that our president is suffering from his own mental health problem.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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