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COLORADO SPRINGS, UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 21: Christy Myers la

Source: The Washington Post / Getty

In the wake of the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs gay club over the weekend, Democrats and media are racing to blame conservatives. The Associated Press and PBS offer a good example:

While [House Speaker Tim] Moore said the party hasn’t solidified its priorities for the long session beginning in January, Senate leader Phil Berger is already reconsidering a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which passed the Senate this year but didn’t get a vote in the House before the session ended.

Touted by GOP senators as a toolkit to help parents oversee their children’s education and health care, the bill included provisions to bar instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in K-3 curricula and require schools to alert parents prior to any change in the name or pronoun used for their child. Cooper condemned the measure and likened it to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

This frames the issue using the language of one side in the debate. But David Strom at Hot Air rejects this:

the epidemic of violence is not in evidence, and unless somebody is inciting violence directly they cannot be held responsible for the behavior of insane people.

Critics of the public school system are not responsible for school shootings; critics of Republicans were not responsible for the baseball field attack on Steve Scalise and other Republicans; and critics of drag queen story hours are not responsible for shootings of gay nightclubs. Maxine Waters is responsible for the harassment of Trump Administration officials in restaurants because she directly called for it.

Calling for violence makes you complicit, even responsible. Criticizing people makes you a participant in public life.

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