The headline at Raw Story — Armed vet destroys gun nuts’ argument on mass shooters — is both true and irrelevant. The story is about a military vet who was carrying a concealed weapon — legally, it so happens — on Oregon’s Umpqua Community College campus Thursday during the shooting. And he says he decided to not intervene because a police SWAT team might have mistaken him for the shooter.

This tells us (a) the campus was not a “gun-free zone,” and (b) an armed populace is not necessarily safer than an unarmed one. But this is irrelevant, because the Right will ignore it.

Regarding the “gun free zone” argument, Shannon Barber writes at Addicting Info:

As we try to get our bearings again after yet another tragic mass shooting at the hands of a madman, as per usual, gun nuts everywhere are screaming “MORE GUNS!” and blaming the Umpqua Community College Campus for being a gun free zone. They blame everything except the real problem: that we need stricter laws regarding who can and cannot purchase firearms.

Well, there’s just one problem with those arguments this time around. The Umpqua campus allows concealed carry, and, according to students and other people affiliated with the school, plenty of people take advantage of it as well. According to John Parker, a student at the school and a veteran of the armed forces, he knows plenty of students who carry on campus; in fact, he was carrying the day of the shooting.

But it won’t matter. I predict the Right will continue to claim that “gun free zones” are especially susceptible to gun violence, and even that all mass shooter incidents have taken place in “gun free zones.” Even those who acknowledge the armed vet story will not let the truth sink in.

I give you Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, who is far from the dumbest or craziest writer on the rightie side of the Web. But he simply refuses to think outside the rightie box. Here is Shaw’s understanding of the pro-gun control side of the issue —

From the liberal, gun grabbing side of the discussion there is one remedy which would – eventually – cut down on mass shootings. It involves eliminating all of the guns on the planet. Owing to the fact that the majority of Americans still value gun rights and view private gun ownership as a positive force in protecting themselves from evil, Democrats are loathe to say the words out loud, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t like to see it happen. Unfortunately, the gun genie is out of the bottle. By removing all guns from existence you would certainly eliminate the threat of mass shootings. Sadly, the transition period would be ugly indeed because the first and easiest guns to confiscate would belong to law abiding owners. Rooting out all of the black market weapons would be a generational effort, leaving the lawful population in the position of being inviting, soft targets for criminals for decades. Then there is the inconvenient fact that guns aren’t only made in America. They are all over the world, and as long as there was a demand in the criminal marketplace the market would find a way to fill it.

In other words, he dismisses gun control arguments by substituting a straw man. Not one of the major gun control advocacy groups is calling for a total ban. He has no idea what the actual gun control arguments are, how effective gun control works in the real world, and no way in hell will he ever be persuaded to look.

As to the rightie side, after the usual demands for more more more guns guns guns, Shaw says,

I’m aware that the left is attempting to make hay out of the fact that there was one “good guy with a gun” on campus on the day of the shooting and he didn’t stop the slaughter. This isn’t even a data point in the discussion. The individual in question – a veteran who was carrying when the shooting took place – could have intervened if he’d chosen, but the fact is that he decided not to. It wasn’t his job to act as security guard and if he decided not to risk his life in a shootout with Mercer I’m not here to second guess him. That doesn’t mean that an armed guard or teacher couldn’t have shut the situation down quickly. And if Mercer had known that a lot more students were armed he might not have shown up at all.

But Mercer had attended classes at Umpqua, so he must have known that the campus was not gun free, and that “plenty of students carry on campus.” And  notice how Shaw brushes aside the veteran’s reason for not stepping in — he wasn’t afraid of a shootout with the perp; he reasoned that he could have been shot by law enforcement who didn’t know who he was.

In fact, armed citizens have been present at a number of mass shootings, and it made no difference.  From an article published after Sandy Hook in 2012:

In fact, there was an armed sheriff’s deputy at Columbine High School the day of the shooting. There was an armed citizen in the Clackamas Mall in Oregon during a shooting earlier this month. There was an armed citizen at the Gabby Giffords shooting — and he almost shot the unarmed hero who tackled shooter Jared Loughner. Virtually every university in the county already has its own police force. Virginia Tech had its own SWAT-like team. As James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s former press secretary cum gun control advocate, often notes, he was shot along with the president, despite the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of heavily armed and well-trained Secret Service agents and police.

The Right will not acknowledge facts, nor will they ever give gun control data and arguments a fair hearing. Never. Their lips will dry up and fall off their faces first.

See also Obama, Guns, and the Politics of Hoplessness and Four Pro-Gun Arguments We’re Sick of Hearing.

I wrote yesterday that the Interwebs already were concocting a story about Christians being shot in the head in Oregon yesterday, and that we could expect to see persecution complexes on steroids today. Sure enough, today the New York Post is reporting that the gunman of yesterday’s Oregon shooting singled out Christians for execution. This is based on the testimony of two people who are relatives of people they claimed were in the school who may or may not have been witnesses.  But the people repeating this story were not in the school themselves.

Note that people who actually were there are saying the gunman asked people about their religion — he did not specify Christianity — but then shot indiscriminately.

Again, this takes us back to the famous Cassie Bernall story, who allegedly was shot and killed at Columbine because she acknowledged believing in God. Bernall was shot and killed, but more careful investigation revealed that Cassie Bernall didn’t say bleep; it was another young woman who said she believed in God, and that girl survived. Even so, most right-wing Christians still believe the Cassie Bernall story. And some Freepers are blaming President Obama for inciting the killings with his hostility to Christianity.

Barring further corroborating testimony, odds are there was no singling out of Christians for execution; this is a story that emerged from hysteria.

Media outlets pushing the “Christian martyrdom” story are painting the perpetrator, Chris Harper-Mercer, as “hating religion.” But wait … Pam Geller believes the deceased Harper-Mercer was a jihadi. He was asking his victims about their religion so he could killed non-Muslims.  (Steve M has links; I’m not linking to Geller here.) Another right-wing whackjob has confirmed that Harper-Mercer was a jihadi.

On the other hand, several reports say that Harper-Mercer was obsessed with the Irish Republican Army. Yeah, IRA, ISIS, hard to tell the difference.

The portrait of Harper-Mercer emerging on sites like Raw Story and We Hunted the Mammoth is of another Elliot Rodger, the guy full of rage at women. We don’t yet know anything about the victims, however. We do know that Harper-Mercer was white, conservative, and liked to hang out on websites frequented by isolated and badly socialized men who fantasize about sex, death and glory.

Oh, and while pro-unlimited firearm freedom types are outraged that anyone would politicize this tragedy to talk about gun control, they didn’t hesitate to call for looser gun laws that would eliminate so-called “gun free zones.”

However, Umpqua Community College was not a gun-free zone, a little detail I don’t expect to see, ever, on right-wing media.

So what else is not new?