On Claudia Tenney and the Parkland shooting: partisan rhetoric damages legislative possibilities
by Genevieve Shuster ’19, Staff Writer
The United States’ recent mass shooting in Parkland, FL has provoked a particularly odd and disturbing set of comments from public of officials, namely President Donald Trump, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, and, closest to home here on the Hill, our Republican Congressional representative Claudia Tenney of New York’s 22nd Congressional District.
On Feb. 14, former student Nikolas Cruz opened re in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 students and faculty, committing the ninth- deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. After every mass shoot- ing, the same kind of rhetoric tends to crop up. Some advocate for gun control while others blame “people not guns”, some advocate for political change while others abhor framing mass shootings as a political issue. While politicians can fall on either side of the gun debate, they almost always center their comments around grieving for the lives lost.
Representative Tenney, however took a different stance. In a radio interview hosted by Fred Dicker on Feb. 21, Tenney declared, “Obviously there’s a lot of politics in it. And it’s interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats, but the media doesn’t talk about that.” Preventing this unfounded claim from being written off as an offhand remark, Tenney hammered in the nail not once but twice, first in a statement her of office released later that night in which she said: “I am fed up with the media and liberals attempting to politicize tragedies and demonize law-abiding gun owners and conservative Americans every time there is a horrible tragedy. While we know the perpetrators of these atrocities have a wide variety of political views, my comments are in response to a question about the failure to prosecute illegal gun crime. I will continue to stand up for law-abiding citizens who are smeared by anti-gun liberal elitists.” When asked about this statement by WKTV NewsChannel 12, she held rm once again: “I don’t think either party has a monopoly on this, but there are many who are either Democrats, left-leaning or you could describe that there’s a lot that aren’t really registered to vote, but they’re left-leaning.”
Tenney is a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, per the Republican Party line. Media source Upstate New York reports that Tenney is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which endorsed her in the 2016 election and donated nearly $6,000 to her campaign. Her campaign website leaves little to the imagination: “She firmly believes that it is our constitutional right to bear arms and it SHALL NOT be infringed.” Tenney’s stance is incredibly clear; however, her most recent comments have taken a rogue turn and made national headlines.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Tenney’s claims is their baselessness. In a fact-check article on Tenney’s claim, Politifact analyzed the political identities of many recent shooters and did not find a correlation between liberalism and mass shootings.
This stance is supported by much of the theory about mass shootings and especially school shootings. In her book Ram- page: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine S. Newman identities the motive of school shooters primarily as an attempt at redemption for socially isolated and romantically unsuccessful white males. She does not find a correlation between political beliefs and school shootings. This claim, which is well-supported in her book, is endorsed by Michael Ian Black in his New York Times article about mass shootings, “The Boys Are Not All Right”.
Of the ten deadliest mass shootings in American history, only the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 was widely presumed to have been politically charged, in this case, anti-LGBTQ. While extremist groups sometimes claim mass shootings in the name of their abhorrent causes and the occasional politically-motivated shooting does occur, there is a distinct lack of correlation be- tween liberalism — or any political stance — and mass shootings.
Aside from being unsupported, Tenney’s comments are insensitive and irrelevant in the wake of extreme tragedy. When a mass shooting happens, many people shame those who supposedly “make it political” by advocating for gun control. Critics view this kind of action as detracting from grieving the tragedy. However, advocating for gun control after 17 lives are lost, in addition to hundreds and hundreds of others over the years, feels not only natural but necessary, as this tragic loss of live is preventable. Lives hang in the balance of the policy, and Tenney’s comments ignore the core of the issue entirely. By being so incredibly removed from the real cause of mass-shootings, Tenney’s comments belittle the immediate importance of preventing violence like this from occurring again.
