Glocks—Not the Time or the Place

The setting: The memorial service for five slain Dallas police officers in Dallas.

The subject: Gripes about government spending and gun laws.

The speaker: President Barrack Obama:

As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools! We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment! We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs! We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book!

The sheer nonsense of the Glock remark is baffling, writes NRO’s Jim Geraghty.

…even if Obama had made his complaint in a less glaringly inaccurate way – “too many poor communities have too many gun shops and too few libraries,” say – it wouldn’t have belonged at a memorial service, which is supposed to be about the dearly departed.

There are, of course, rules of decorum that apply outside of services honoring the dead, and they, too, have been broken recently. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to think the role of the justices under the Constitution is to act as presidential campaign surrogates. Three times in the last week, she made clear in interviews that she thinks Donald Trump’s election would be disastrous.

Many complain about the American public’s “steadily eroding loss of respect for its leaders. But it’s hard to argue the loss of respect is unfounded when those leaders act so disrespectfully themselves,” writes Mr. Geraghty.

Without diminishing the indignities that black men have endured, adds Mona Charon in NRO, during the President’s memorial service speech, shouldn’t Mr. Obama have acknowledged that the chief reason black men are targeted by police “is not racism but the extremely high crime rate among black men”?

Too many black children are growing up in chaotic homes and attending miserable schools. Too many fall into crime. And too many are still hassled by police. It would have been bracing to hear that from the first black president, but he fell back on Leftist clichés instead.”