President Obama couldn’t wait for the facts to come in before addressing the nation on the Roseburg shootings, openly calling them “something we should politicize.”  Eager to distract the country from the collapse of his Syria policy and the triumph of Russia in replacing the U.S. as the dominant force in the Middle East, he seized upon the deaths as means to advance his anti-gun agenda, with absolutely no knowledge of the guns used, or the means by which the shooter acquired them.  He referred to himself 28 times in the course of his 12-minute speech.  It reminded me of his rush to judgment in declaring that the Cambridge Police “acted stupidly” in the arrest of his pal Skip Gates.

Jacob Sullum of Reason exposed the vacuity of his knee-jerk reaction:

The president insisted that "modest regulation," consistent with the Second Amendment rights of "law-abiding gun owners," could "prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America." But as Brian Doherty pointed out, Obama did not mention a single specific policy fitting that description.

That telling omission makes it pretty hard to buy Obama's argument that anyone who opposes "common-sense gun-safety laws" has blood on his hands. "This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America," he said. "We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction." If only we had done something, in other words, those people in Oregon would still be alive. But we are left to guess what that thing might be.

So far, President Obama has said nothing about the ongoing carnage in his hometown of Chicago, where every weekend sees a slaughter nearly as bad as the event in Roseburg.  Last weekend, for instance, as Rick Moran noted, "the city saw a spasm of violence rare even for Chicago; 14 people were shot in 15 hours, including 6 dead."

Chicago has some of the toughest gun control laws in America.

Cynics, like Streiff of Red State, see racism in Obama’s selective outrage:

Let’s be clear on this. Obama does not care about dead bodies in the street. If he did he’d set up a tent in Chicago so he could be on site as a dozen or so people are killed or wounded each weekend. He won’t do that because those people are primarily black or Hispanic and he knows his liberal base thinks that is just what minorities do. If he was really interested in dead bodies he’d be down on the Arizona-Mexico border where the actions of his own Justice Department have made that area a war zone by illegally passing weapons to unauthorized buyers. If he actually cared he would have shown some vague interest when a military recruiting station was shot up in Chattanooga. He is, allegedly, the commander-in-chief. But he couldn’t show concern because the shooter was a Muslim radical (or radical Muslim, YMMV). He could have shown concern when three Muslim students were gunned down in North Carolina but the shooter was one of his lunatic supporters.

I see politics, not racism, at work.  Obama is the consummate cynic, anxious to disarm the American people.  When he and the other gun-grabbers dismiss their armed guards and agree to go out into daily life without firearms to protect them, I will start taking them more seriously.