Something utterly awful happened in Uvalde, Texas yesterday: a man who can only be described as a psychopath (and who looked remarkably like Richard Ramirez, AKA the Night Stalker serial killer) entered an elementary school and slaughtered at least nineteen children and two teachers.  My heart bleeds for the people whose loved ones will never come home and for the lives so cruelly cut short.  Facts are still sparse, but the one thing we know with certainty is that Joe Biden disgraced himself when he used a tragedy that shocked the nation as the springboard for a political rant. 

As was to be expected, given his place in the White House, Biden "addressed the nation." For the first two and a half minutes, Biden actually did sound like a statesman and decent person.

He spoke of the horrible loss experienced by every parent who sees a child die.  I've been singularly blessed in that I haven't had to know that pain, but Biden has lost two of his children.  Looking and sounding every minute of his age, with his voice weak and his expression drawn, Biden's initial statement showed genuine compassion that was heartfelt and moving:

I had hoped that when I became president, I would not have to do this again. Another massacre. Uvalde, Texas. An elementary school. Beautiful, innocent second, third, and fourth graders. And how many scores of little children who witnessed what happened, see [sic] their friends die as if they were in a battlefield, for God's sake? They will live with it the rest of their lives.

There is a lot we don't know yet. There is a lot we do know. The parents who will never see their child again and never have them jump in the bed and cuddle with them. Parents who will never be the same.

To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There is a hollowness in your chest. You feel like you are being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out. Suffocating. It is never quite the same. It is a feeling shared by the siblings and the grandparents and the family members of the community that is left behind.

Scripture says — Jill and I have talked about this in different contexts, in other contexts — the Lord is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit [Psalm 34-18]. So many crushed spirits.

So, tonight, I asked the nation to pray for them and give the parents and siblings the strength in the darkness they feel right now.

That is a beautiful encomium.  Those are words one expects from a nation's leader in a time of national sorrow.

But Biden couldn't maintain that pose.  Instantly shaking off his solemn lethargy, Biden launched into an impassioned rant that saw him demanding gun control; insisting that the 1994 "assault weapons" ban worked; and blaming gun-manufacturers for a crazed, evil man's decision to enter a school and murder children and their teachers.  It was an ugly, divisive, and error-filled speech.

Image: Biden using tragedy to play politics.  YouTube screen grab.

Regarding those errors, if Biden is going to play politics, let's at least make sure his lies don't stand unchallenged.

Definitive studies show that the 1994 "assault weapons" ban did not affect gun violence.  Unsurprisingly, criminals ignored it.

Yes, America has seen shootings with tragically high death counts (although none at the hands of an NRA member), but it's fallacious to pretend America, the third largest country in the world by a wide margin, is the only one in which such tragedies happen.

In Kenya, in 2015, gunmen killed 148 people.  In Pakistan, in 2014, gunmen killed 141 people, mostly children.  In Paris, in 2015, men with guns and bombs killed 130 people.  In Oslo, in 2011, a gunman killed 77 children.  In Kenya (again), in 2013, gunmen killed 67 people.  In South Korea, in 1982, a gunman killed 56 people.  In New Zealand, in 2019, a gunman killed 51 people.  In Tunisia, in 2015, gunmen killed 38 people.  In Australia, in 1996, a gunman killed 35 people.  In Scotland, in 1994, a gunman killed 17 people, 16 of whom were students.  In China, in 1994, a gunman killed 28 people.  (We won't even touch upon the trucks, bombs, knives, and poison gas used abroad for mass murders.)

There's one constant in mass shootings, in America or elsewhere: the gunmen target unarmed people.  And as a reminder, there is no killer more dangerous than an armed government against its own, disarmed people.

Biden wasn't half so upset when his policies directly kill people, as he showed when his harum-scarum pullout led to thirteen troop deaths at the Kabul airport and then the military, on Biden's watch, slaughtered seven children in Afghanistan.

It is spitting on graves to go on a crude political rant as the response to the Uvalde tragedy.  For Biden, it's politics first, last, and always, and that is why he is a political animal of the lowest kind.  Tucker Carlson, after listening to Biden's statement, summed up perfectly just how contemptible Biden is:

The President of the United States, frail, confused, bitterly partisan, desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points from the Democratic party, dividing the country in a moment of deep pain rather than uniting, his voice rising, amplified only as he repeats the talking points he repeated for over 35 years in the United States Senate, partisan politics being the only thing that animates him. Unfit for the leadership of this country.