Two sad truths became undeniably apparent as a result of the mass murder of ten innocents in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket on March 22.
The first was the eagerness of those on the Left to apply what has become their absurdly simplistic informing conviction, the notion that White people, and more specifically White Men, are the vilest creatures on the planet.
Quasim Rashid, a Pakistani writer and civil rights activist, assuming all White cops to be racists, posted as follows: “Colorado terrorist is a grown White man who killed 10 people including a cop. Cops arrested him alive and helped him to a stretcher for immediate medical care.” His logic was that had the killer not been White, he would have been shot on the spot!
Feminist Amy Siskind agreed, stating: “Shooter taken into custody. In other words it was almost certainly a White man.”
So also did Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena, who tweeted: “Violent White men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”
But while this tragedy was front page fodder when it was thought to have been perpetrated by a White man, it quickly lost its “progressive” elan when it was discovered that the killer was in fact a 21 year old Syrian immigrant, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. His Islamic beliefs, apparently, had little to do with his killing spree. But while he was not a compulsive Ideologue, he was, according to his brother, given to anti-social if not paranoid delusions, an overwhelming sense that he was being persecuted because of his “difference.”
I am hardly in a position to comment on the legitimacy of his suspicions. But the second disturbing aspect of the events of Mar. 22 would seem to be the ease with which one whose own brother thought him to be given to paranoid delusions was able to pass the so-called “background check” of a local gun store and purchase a lethal weapon just a few days before using it to end the lives of ten innocent strangers.
As a “conservative” I absolutely believe in the right of law abiding citizens to defend themselves. Indeed I have read multiple stories of those who, along with their families, managed to survive vicious criminal assaults because they owned legally acquired weapons. But at the same time the events of Mar. 22 in Boulder would seem to suggest that those granted such weapons need to be “fact checked” far more thoroughly than is presently the case in the U.S. and, perhaps, also here in Canada.