Actress Amy Schumer took to the podium a few days ago, in the wake of the theater shooting tragedy in Lafayette, La., to denounce violence and advocate gun control. Her film, Trainwreck, had been showing at the theater when a mentally disturbed man with apparently extremist views opened fire, murdering two and injuring nine. He later killed himself rather than surrender to police.
The fact that her film was on-screen during this horrible incident was apparently the catalyst for Ms. Schumer's desire to make her views known at the press conference, as she also did on "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.
Accompanying Ms. Schumer at the press conference was her distant cousin, Chuck, the liberal Democratic senator from New York. My moral and intellectual dissonance alarms began wailing like banshees when I saw the senator take the podium. This is the same man who, along with another senator, fellow Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, chose to absent himself from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on July 21 for victims of violence perpetrated by criminal aliens.
It appears that the senator's empathy for victims of violence is remote, abstract, and only applicable when it serves a pet cause; one that includes gun control, but unambiguously does not go so far as disapproval for state and local governments that, rather than surrender alien criminals to federal immigration authorities for deportation, choose to release them to the streets to reoffend with a wide variety of crimes including murder, rape, and pedophilic abuse.
The moral and intellectual disconnect of such a position is huge. Does the good senator think that guns fire themselves?
Sen. Schumer's Empathy for Some Victims of Violence, but Not Others
Topics: Politics, Criminal Aliens