Politicians now typically respond to major tragedies with an outpouring of … opportunistic agenda-pushing. This disgusting penchant for capitalizing on the public’s grief and fear — evidenced in the nefarious USA PATRIOT Act following the attacks of 9/11 — has, of course, surfaced on multiple fronts after the massacre in Orlando.
While the nation mourned and attempted to parse how, exactly, a shooter had pulled off the slaughter of 49 people while pledging allegiance to the so-called Islamic State — despite national domestic surveillance measures, previous FBI scrutiny of shooter Omar Mateen, and a gun store owner/DHS poster child who ‘saw something and said something’ — politicians plotted to see just how many of your rights they could disappear.
In fact, their varied assaults on your liberties share an undeniably laughable common thread: each proposal would rob you of yet more freedom while doing nothing at all to prevent another attack.
But that doesn’t mean politicians and government agencies won’t employ the logically fallacious appeal to emotion, as in fears roused by Orlando, as a weapon to get what they want — indeed, they count on all of us to succumb to such scaremongering so we’ll willingly sign over the precious few rights we have left.
Proposing gun control legislation might not be shocking in itself following a slaughter in a public place, but guns only constitute the guise for these pernicious policies with distressingly Orwellian consequences. As the public erupted in ire on either side of the classically American issue of firearms, a number of Congress members constructed several pieces of legislation that would unite the opposing sides — were they not exploitative of people’s worst fears.
Read more: How Politicians Capitalized on the Orlando Shooting to Take Away Your Rights