Tuesday, July 29, 2025

ONLY REPUBLICANS ARE ALLOWED TO BE WRONG

There was a shooting in midtown Manhattan yesterday. The gunman, Shane Tamura of Las Vegas, was apparently of Black and East Asian descent. Your right-wing relatives are furious about this:
CNN received ridicule and criticism on Monday after its reporting that the suspect in a deadly New York shooting was “possibly white” was quickly disproven.

Reporting on the shooting on her show Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN host Erin Burnett asked, “Was his face visible? I mean, do they have any idea at this point who he is?”

CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller replied, “They do not know who he is. They know he is a male, possibly white....”


I don't know exactly what right-wingers imagine when they think about a CNN reporter, but John Miller doesn't match their stereotypes. He has alternated jobs in the media with long stints in law enforcement, working for police commissioner William Bratton in both New York and Los Angeles; his first job with the NYPD was under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He also went to work for the FBI during George W. Bush's presidency. I wouldn't bet the rent money that he's a registered Democrat.

He said this, as did CNN's Erin Burnett, and they're being slammed for it. Meanwhile, Republican propagandists were spreading this erroneous report:


Loomer's tweet went on to say:
@ZohranKMamdani and the trend of nominating/electing Muslims to run for office in the US is empowering Middle Eastern people and people who support the Free Palestine movement to kill cops.

It will get worse when Mamdani is Mayor of NYC.

It’s time for the Trump admin to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
There's not even a "possibly" in either of these tweets, which were absolutely wrong. The incorrect identification of the shooter apparently came from the cops, according to the New York Post: "Early police reports also suggested the suspect might be of Middle Eastern descent." The cops weren't sure, but Laura Loomer and Chaya Raichik ran with this as if it was established fact.

As it turns out, if there was a Muslim involved in this incident, it was the police officer who died at the scene. His name was Islam.:
Didarul Islam, a 36-year-old New York Police Department officer, was among four people killed Monday when a gunman stormed the lobby of a sprawling office tower in Midtown Manhattan and opened fire.

A Bangladeshi immigrant hailed as a hero by city officials, Islam leaves behind two young sons and his wife, who is pregnant with their third child.

Islam had been off duty but in uniform working security in the building when he was shot and killed by Shane Devon Tamura, 27, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
The right-wing propaganda machine wants CNN to be attacked for its errors, while Loomer, Raichik, and all their allies are free to say all the ignorant, misinformed, bigoted things they please.

And then there's Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who went on Sean Hannity's show last night to politicize the shooting (it's never "too soon" to politicize a shooting if you're a Republican):
“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws. We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, maybe thousands,” Kennedy said on Sean Hannity’s show. “We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control.”

... The Louisiana senator also floated bringing back stop-and-frisk, a policy with a controversial history of targeting communities of color in New York City.

“The other thing that, frankly, New York’s going to have to face, is the issue of whether we should bring back more aggressive stop and frisk, which is a perfectly legal law enforcement tactic,” he said.
Let's go back to that photo of the shooter:


You want to frisk someone who's open-carrying an assault weapon? How does that even make sense?

Tamura reportedly drove cross-country in order to commit this crime. It's not clear that he ever left his vehicle with the gun on his person until he was about to start shooting. When was he supposed to be stopped and frisked, and on what grounds? Because he was a Black man behind the wheel of a car? (That's probably the answer most Republicans would give.)

Also, despite a documented history of mental illness, Tamura had a concealed-carry permit from the state of Nevada. It actually wasn't legal for Tamura to carry that gun in New York -- but Senator Kennedy apparently believes it should have been. Here's a press release from earlier this year:
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today joined Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and colleagues in introducing the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. The bill would allow individuals with concealed carry privileges in their home states to exercise those rights in any other state that allows concealed carry, so long as one exercises those rights within the limits of each respective state’s laws.
New York State has a concealed carry law, though it's fairly restrictive. I'm not sure whether the bill Kennedy endorsed would have required New York State to waive the licensing and permitting restrictions for out-of-state gun owners -- but eventually, I assume, the entire country will have Red America's most accommodating gun laws, whether we like them or not, and Senator Kennedy will be pleased.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:31 AM 12 Comments
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