Emily Miller: Obama Pushing Anti-Gun Agenda With Navy Shooting

President Obama attempted to “scare the American public” to further his gun control agenda in his comments concerning Monday’s shooting at a Washington D.C. naval yard, Emily Miller of the Washington Times wrote in an editorial.

Miller, a senior editor of opinion at the Times and author of “Emily Gets Her Gun,” chastised Obama for saying that even though he didn’t have the facts, “We’re confronting yet another mass shooting. And today it happened on a military installation in our nation’s capital.”

Miller took issue with the words “yet another,” pointing out that the last mass shooting occurred in December at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, more than nine months ago.

“While we mourn every one of those children and educators lost that day — and today in Washington, D.C. — these events are not a cause for increased alarm,” Miller wrote.

Miller cited a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Study (CRS) released in April that showed there have been 78 public mass shootings in the last 30 years that claimed 547 lives, which averages to 18 victims a year.

“To put that number in context, there were 8,583 murders by firearm in the U.S. in 2011, the most recent year for which we have figures from the FBI,” Miller wrote.

“And, there were 851 people accidentally killed by firearms in 2011, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The congressional report concluded that ‘while tragic and shocking, public mass shootings account for few of the murders related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.’”

At his press conference Monday, Obama said the mass shooting at the naval building will be investigated thoroughly “as we do so many of these shootings sadly that have happened and do everything we can to try to prevent them.”

“But Mr. Obama never has much to say about the thousands of people murdered every year in individual shootings,” Miller wrote.

Instead, Miller wrote, Obama “focuses on the rare mass shootings because the uncontrollable and random nature of them are more frightening to the public, which is politically helpful for him to push his gun-control agenda.”

Miller believes Obama does all Americans a disservice by treating mass shootings as “a common occurrence.”

“He does this to frighten people into believing that they are in more danger in order to get support for more gun control,” Miller wrote.