. . . the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.
What explains this displacement? A reader proffers an explanation:
Maybe they displace responsibility here because, if we blame the person shooting the gun, next we have to notice just how often that person is black, and how rarely he is white. And noticing that, for liberals, would be racist. Nothing that makes blacks look bad, or worse than others in any way, can be noticed. It must be a gun problem because otherwise it would be a black problem. (Largely, on the whole — given what a small proportion of the population is black and what a huge proportion of the 'gun problem' consists of black people shooting people for no good reason.)
Right. It is politically incorrect to take note of differences between blacks and other groups when these differences show blacks to be worse in some respects than these other groups.
On the other hand, when once in a while the person shooting the gun is a white person–and, best of all, a white person who just might conceivably be associated with conservatism or even some kind of white consciousness –liberals will find that the problem is, for once, not just a gun problem but also the problem of 'angry white men', 'racists', 'white supremacists' or even just 'white people'… And then we learn that it's those people — those bad white people–who are responsible for this awful gun culture and gun problem. So once again, the liberals are really engaged in race hatred and race baiting and maybe, some day, open race war. So as with so many other things, it seems they don't really believe their own supposed principles, e.g., that the problem is guns not people shooting guns . . . .
My reader's point seems to be that leftists try to have it both ways at once. By blaming the weapons rather than the wielders, leftists can uphold their cherished but plainly false conviction that blacks are no more criminally prone than whites: there is nothing about blacks that makes them more criminally prone; it is the availability of guns! But their real agenda as destructive leftists is to foment racial division. So when a white man goes on a rampage, then they drop the notion that the availability of guns is the problem and play the race card.