As predictably as night follows day, the Trump administration and at least one of its Fox News lackeys have come up with an excuse to blame President Barack Obama for the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
This morning, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway blamed Obama for Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s ability to obtain “bump stocks,” devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic ones. From The Washington Post:
“It was President Obama’s ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in 2010 that decided not to regulate this device,” [Conway] told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “That should be part of the conversation and part of the facts that you put before your viewers.”
From Conway’s mouth to Fox News!
Having apparently lost the “too soon to politicize” effort to stifle talk about gun control, and with the NRA and Republicans now open to regulations on bump stocks, Outnumbered cohost Harris Faulkner (who doubles as an unbiased anchor on newscasts) just happened to adopt Conway’s attack as her own during a very opportune-for-Republicans moment during today’s show.
First, though, Faulkner seemed to have “forgotten” how she scolded the left on Monday for bringing up gun control so soon after the Las Vegas mass shooting. Now that her GOP pals are on board, Faulkner said that maybe the immediate aftermath is the right time to talk gun control after all:
FAULKNER: I gotta tell you… two weeks after Orlando, two weeks after San Bernardino, when the left, the right, everybody said we were gonna talk about these issues, we didn’t. So maybe you’re forced to take in the moment. I don’t know, I’m just asking the question.
But later, after cohost Gillian Turner talked about the importance of Americans feeling safe in public, Faulkner got to work blaming Obama. She also suggested that it’s OK to support bump stock regulations because it’s a way to stick it to him and the Democrats:
FAULKNER: You know why that’s so interesting? Because the one-off political issues tend to be pro-lawmaker and it looks like grandstanding. I don’t know if that’s what Democrats’ goal is today but they do need to be reminded that the addition that this man reportedly added on to his guns, that bump stock, as it’s being called, that was new to me, came under the Obama administration legality of that. That addition on to a gun. And I’m not hearing that from Democrats.
Predictably, that also served as a prompt for another round of demonizing the left.
But even so, Faulkner oversold her blame for Obama. It’s not as though he endorsed bump stock or enacted legislation legalizing them. He merely followed the recommendation of his Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives not to ban them. As The Post explains, that’s because his Bureau concluded that they had not “contravened federal regulations against machine guns, as they did not modify the machinery of guns themselves.” In other words, Obama concluded they were not outlawed.
Watch Faulkner once again prove she’s little more than a GOP puppet below, from the October 5, 2017 Outnumbered.