The GOP baseball team shooting: A call for calm

Tribune-Review
Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:48 a.m. | Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:48 a.m.

Investigators look for evidence around the baseball field that was the scene of a shooting Wednesday in Alexandria, Va., after House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others were shot during a GOP congressional baseball practice. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Following the nation's collective shock over Wednesday's shooting of five people at a GOP congressional baseball team practice, the poisoned political recoil begins.

It's Trump Derangement Syndrome! It's the leftist “resistance”! It's the plethora of guns enabled by the NRA! And so the pundits who wring their hands over this senseless act reach for the gasoline rather than pausing and stepping back from their entrenched battlements.

If not for the courage of Capitol Police, who returned gunfire and killed the shooter, James T. Hodgkinson III, 66, of Illinois, the attack at the gated baseball field in Alexandria, Va., could have been a massacre. Among victims in this hail of gunfire are House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a congressional aide, a lobbyist and Capitol Police officers.

Mr. Hodgkinson, unemployed and apparently unhinged by President Trump's election, “wasn't very happy with the way things were going,” according to his brother. Reportedly Hodgkinson asked Rep. Ron DeSantis beforehand if those practicing were Republicans or Democrats.

The episode brings to mind another lawmaker's shooting six years ago outside an Arizona supermarket. Democrat Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was seriously wounded. Her attacker was an apolitical schizophrenic. Yet that didn't stop the fusillade of attacks from the liberal punditocracy on GOP “rhetoric,” all of which resolved nothing.

Instead of politically capitalizing on yet another catastrophe, let's put the agendas on hold, for a change, and learn how to prevent such heinous attacks.