Slain Police Officer's Father Lashes Out at Those Using Son's Death to Push Gun Control
This is one message the mainstream media won’t be happy with, but the rest of the country has to hear.
In the wake of the mass shooting Monday in Boulder, Colorado, liberal politicians and pundits brought out their usual playbook, turning the deaths of 10 innocent victims into ammunition to attack the Second Amendment.
But the father of one of those victims isn’t going to stand for it.
Homer Talley’s son, Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, was the sole law enforcement officer killed in the shooting rampage at the King Soopers grocery.
Always remember: Police Officer Eric Talley, Boulder Police Department, Colorado https://t.co/ykOJPTGgOx pic.twitter.com/261eKRS9fQ
— National Fallen Officer Foundation (@nationalfof) March 24, 2021
Talley told TMZ that his son — a father who left behind a wife and seven children — would not have wanted his death to be hijacked by gun rights opponents.
“My son would have been deeply offended to know his death would be used to promote gun control,” Talley said. “Before he was an officer, he enjoyed shooting.”
The preferences of a slain police officer will almost certainly do nothing to deter liberals from using the Boulder shooting – along with last week’s mass killing in the Atlanta area – as cannon fodder in their war on the Second Amendment.
Not even 24 hours had passed after the shootings before President Joe Biden was using the attack to justify a sweeping ban on the kind of firearms liberals call “assault weapons.”
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common-sense steps that will save lives in the future, and urge my colleagues in the House and the Senate to act,” Biden said.
“We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country,” he said. “I got that done as a senator. It passed and was the law for the longest time. And it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”
Biden was referring to the 10-year ban on “assault weapons” passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1994.
There are three things about that bill worth pointing out here.
The first is that a 2004 Department of Justice study on the decade-long ban on some semiautomatic rifles and “high-capacity magazines” found it was “premature” to state its effectiveness as a crime-fighting tool. However, the study noted: “Having said this, the ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
If, after 10 years, it was “premature” to say whether the law worked, or its benefits were “small at best,” it’s not at all too early to say American constitutional freedoms were infringed for negligible or nonexistent gains.
The second is that it was halfway through the 10-year “assault weapons” ban when the United States experienced the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999.
Clearly, a ban on “assault weapons” doesn’t prevent mass killings, no matter what Biden might believe — or pretend to.
The third is that the Democrats were thumped badly in the 1994 midterms after that bill was signed, losing control of the Senate as well as the House, a body they had run for 40 years.
That last point is a lesson politicians in both parties should remember when they consider Biden’s call to the Senate on Tuesday to take up two gun-control bills passed earlier this month by the leftist-Democrat-controlled House on virtual party-line votes.
In Biden’s telling, the bills received votes from both “Democrats and Republicans in the House.“
That was true enough, since the support of less than a dozen Republicans made the votes “nominally bipartisan,” as even CBS News noted. But the reality is, there are few more divisively partisan issues in the United States today than Second Amendment freedoms.
That’s as true today as it was in 1994, even if Democrats would like to think otherwise. And 1994 did not work out so well for them.
And slain police officer Eric Talley was a confirmed believer in Second Amendment freedoms, his father said.
He would not have wanted his death politicized by the opponents of those rights the Founders enshrined in the Constitution, Homer Talley told TMZ.
“Just because some wacko goes around shooting people doesn’t mean guns need to be taken away,” he said. “You can’t take away enough guns to protect this country.”
But politicizing death is what Democrats do. Their willingness to use mankind’s “Great Equalizer” in the service of their political goals borders on the blasphemous. This is the party, remember, that never lets a serious crisis go to waste.
It’s not likely Talley’s message is going to make it to the White House. The Democratic playbook has been run too many times for it to change much now (except maybe a dash of “white supremacy”). That makes it all the more important the rest of the country hears it.
Under the American philosophy outlined in the Declaration of Independence, the purpose of government is to guarantee the natural rights of human beings. In the Constitution, one of those rights is the right to bear arms.
That government has no business using the deaths of the innocent — especially Second Amendment supporters — to try to take them away.
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