Who’s playing politics now?

Marc Theissen:

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if, in his Monday statement on the Las Vegas shooting, President Trump had praised the police who ran toward the gunfire and saved so many lives, and then said: “And for all those who have been taking a knee to protest the police, shame on you. On Sunday, you slander them, but then on Monday, you need them. The police deserve our respect every day.”

Heads would have exploded — and rightly so. His critics would have pointed out that workers still had not removed all the bodies from the crime scene, and yet he was already injecting politics into this tragedy. The president’s job is to unite the country, they would have said, not divide us.

Of course, Trump did not say anything of the sort. His statement Monday was moving and appropriate. The great irony is that it was Democrats — those constantly outraged by Trump responding inappropriately to crises and dividing the country — who responded to the Las Vegas shooting like partisan hacks.

At 10:03 a.m., while bodies were still lying where they fell and victims were in hospitals fighting for their lives, Hillary Clinton decided to go on the attack. “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get,” she tweeted. This was not only inappropriate, it was also inane. Her tweet had nothing to do with the events in Las Vegas. There is no such thing as a “silencer” like you see in a James Bond movie. There are “suppressors,” which reduce gunshot noise but do not eliminate it. Even if the shooter had used one in Las Vegas, The Post reported, the effect “probably would have been negligible.”

Undeterred by ignorance, Clinton tweeted again a minute later, at 10:04 a.m., urging Americans to “put politics aside [and] stand up to the NRA.” Of course, she was doing the opposite of putting politics aside. And she was not alone Monday morning. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) criticized “my colleagues in Congress [who] are so afraid of the gun industry” and declared that “the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference.” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) tweeted, “More blood on hands of heartless NRA and soulless gun industry.”

The speed with which some on the left rushed to politicize this incident was pathetic but not surprising. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, many on the left rushed to blame the tea party for inciting the attacker, only to learn later that the shooting had nothing to do with politics. By contrast, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who returnedto work last week following an assassination attempt by a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter in June — set an example for all of us when he called on all Americans to respond to the Las Vegas attack “with countless acts of kindness, warmth and generosity.” He is absolutely right.

Should we have another debate about gun control? Sure. But not while bodies were still in the streets and we still did not know what weapons were used or how they were acquired.

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