Over the last few days, gun humpers have been working overtime trying to lay the blame on everything, anything, other than guns or toxic masculinity. Since the "what if we armed teachers, who are already underpaid and overworked?" argument didn't go over so well the last time, this time they've decided to get creative. They've blamed doors, they've blamed Ritalin, they've blamed abortion, Erick Erickson wrote some thing about how the only way to stop this is for everyone to become heterosexual Christians, which is creepy but typical.
They've grasped at so many straws that I am currently taking bets on when they will just go ahead and blame an actual straw.
But Hugh Hewitt has topped them all.
Hewitt explained on his radio show this week that the gun control policies we liberals love would not have done anything to prevent this crime, because he bypassed a background check by getting the gun from his father and did not use an assault-style weapon. It seems Mr. Hewitt is underestimating us, as many of us are also very big fans of Child Access Prevention laws making parents criminally liable when their kid goes on a shooting spree -- which Texas does have, but unlike other states, the law doesn't apply to children who are 18 or over.
But he knows what will stop these shooting sprees, and it is banning trench coats.
He said that local officials and politicians should take steps to identify those individuals.“To the teachers and administrators out there, the trench coat is kind of a giveaway. You might just say no more trench coats. The creepy people, make a list, check it twice,” Hewitt said.
Burberry has yet to release a statement.
I would argue that not only are trenchcoats not creepy, they are a solid fashion investment that literally never goes out of style.
I would also argue that this is very, very stupid!
And, I'd like to point out that Erick Harris and Dylan Klebold were not actually in their school's "Trench Coat Mafia" as the public imagination has held. Those were other kids, entirely. Nice, normal kids who probably just really liked either The Cure or KMFDM and playing Magic: The Gathering like the very nice Trench Coat Mafia kids in my school did (weird but true, we also called those kids the Trench Coat Mafia, pre-Columbine, and I have always wondered how that became a term of art in schools across the country in a mostly pre-internet world).
Dimitrios Pagourtzis did have a few fashion accessories that actually might have been tells -- the iron cross pinned on his trench coat, for example, or perhaps the "born to kill" t-shirt. Those might have been hints that something was a bit wrong with him. Trench coats? Not so much.
There is a lot of pressure right now to come up with something to blame these shootings on that isn't guns, because people are very scared that recognizing that means that someone will take their guns away. This is understandable. If "pizza" were to obviously blame for all of the mass murders, I would probably look for any other answer myself, so that I could selfishly continue to eat all of the pizza. But for crying out loud, come up with something better than a damned coat.
That is just bad detective work, of the sort that might come from a man who owns no trench coats himself.
[The Hill]
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