Photo via @justinbaragona/Twitter
May 26, 2021, 11:30 am
An ex-cop framed by Fox News as an “expert” guest managed to bizarrely blame the recent mass shooting in San Jose, which left nine dead, on people getting vaccinated against COVID-19. He also blamed the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, which at least made some semblance of sense, but was no more comforting to the families of the people killed by senseless gun violence.
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Former NYPD detective Pat Brosnan claimed that he predicted an increase in this type of violence as more people got themselves vaccinated and started going outside again, even stating that the gunman, who died by suicide after the shooting, had likely received the vaccine.
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“This is a time I wish I was wrong with my prediction, which I mention to anybody who will listen, that once COVID starts to lift, these cowardly shooters will come out exactly in tandem with the number of vaccinations,” he said.
“You can be sure they probably got vaccinated.”
Brosnan is starkly incorrect in stating that gun violence has increased in 2021, however. Though shootings that could be defined as “mass shootings” did appear to decline in 2020, the year that arguably contained the worst of the pandemic in the U.S. was also our worst for gun-related deaths in decades, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
It’s also arguably bizarre to claim that people who intend to shoot and kill as many people as possible before either going to prison for life or taking their own life were afraid to do so in 2020 because of COVID-19. The only reasonable explanation is that there were fewer crowds to target in 2020 due to lockdowns and social distancing, but that’s not what Brosnan appeared to be talking about.
“They were scared to come out. Numbers don’t lie,” Brosnan concluded. “The shootings are up dramatically. Skyrocketing actually on active shootings throughout the United States as we have come through this pandemic.”
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Gun violence injuries and deaths for 2021 actually appear to be on pace with years prior to the pandemic, though that data is, of course, incomplete.
Brosnan’s initial argument for why the San Jose shooting happened was that the 2020 protests sparked by Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd reduced the enforcement of laws and empowered mass shooters, noting that this tragedy occurred near a police station. As far as we know, there has been no actual reduction in the enforcement of laws against crimes like mass murder.
“In a rational world where there is adherence to the rule of law and respect for law enforcement—say pre-the Summer of Love of 2020—I think there would be more nuanced response in terms of opening a shooting, an active shooting right next door to where there is a load of armed professional shooters under law enforcement,” said Brosnan.
“The rules have changed,” he added. “Crimes are no longer illegal. There is no longer enforcement of lots of laws and there’s an empowerment of these active shooters.”
Brosnan did not mention the steady increase in the number of firearms owned by Americans in tandem with Republicans gutting gun control laws as a possible contributing factor to this latest in the country’s long line of mass shootings. On Twitter, people were not impressed by his alternative explanations.
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*First Published: May 26, 2021, 11:30 am
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