As soon as news broke about an horrific shooting spree inside an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, where a packed house was watching The Dark Knight Rises premiere, right-wing blogs began bracing themselves for what they fear will be a liberal assault on the right to bear arms. On Breitbart.com, one post highlighted a series of tweets by CNN’s Piers Morgan, in which he cited the “horrendous details from this Colorado cinema shooting,” adding that “America has got to do something about its gun laws. Now is the time.” Breitbart.com’s John Nolte had a few choice words for Piers and other “liberals” who might view the Colorado tragedy as a chance to restart the (non-existent) national debate about guns:
If there’s an American tragedy, within hours you can always expect our corrupt media to feast on the corpses of the victims in order to push their left-wing political agenda. …
And at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, blogger Mike Opelka went after ABC’s Brian Ross, writing: “It did not take very long for opportunists to try and twist the tragedy in Colorado to match their own beliefs. ABC news has already found someone to place blame on the Tea Party.”
In fact, the only public figure calling for gun control in the wake of the Colorado tragedy is New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who, on the scale of our current politics, probably does count as a liberal.