Massacre in Midtown. Four Innocents Dead. Why Are There Even Women and Children Still in Gaza? What Does Gutfeld! Have that Colbert Doesn’t? & More
What can you say about a shooting spree that turns a midtown Manhattan skyscraper into a killing zone and claims the lives of four innocent people?
Shane Tamura, 27, who had a history of mental illness, can be seen in a news photo striding purposefully towards the skyscraper with his gun exposed. A Las Vegas resident, Tamura had driven from Nevada to Manhattan, arriving shortly before he started killing people. Tamura, who is now dead, turned the gun on himself.
A CNN host took a look at the photo of Tamura and said hopefully that Tamura was “possibly white.” Pay a visit to LensCrafters. Please. A former football player, Tamura’s beef seemed to be with the NFL, which is headquartered in the building.
The Daily Mail has details. Tamura comes across as stark raving mad, ending his plea, “Study my brain,” and an apology for “everything.” I guess that apology includes the four people he killed in cold blood?
A brave NYPD officer identified as Didarul Islam, 36, father of two with another child on the way, was one of Tamura’s victims. The Bangladeshi community is mourning Officer Islam’s death:
[Family friend Marjanul] Karim said that Officer Islam’s ability to flourish in New York — the house, the solid municipal job — had made him a model.
“People in lesser positions would often ask him, how do you do it?” Mr. Karim said. “And he loved the force. He got his foot in the door, and so he encouraged people to do the same.
“He said serve the community and you’ll do fine.”
New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani addressed the massacre long-distance from his Ugandan Shangri La, where he is celebrating his wedding. In the aftermath of the tragedy, social media suddenly is remembering that Mamdani has pledged to defund the police. Republican Senator John Kennedy addressed the inevitable topic of more gun control:
Sen. John Kennedy dismissed the idea of tightening up gun laws — instead suggesting that the city brings back the stop-and-frisk tactic to combat gun violence.
“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws,” Kennedy (R-La.) said on Sean Hannity’s show Monday.
“We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, Sean. Maybe thousands. We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control, and I don’t know exactly how to do that.”
Tamura had a concealed carry permit. This terrible event is evidence that we need to enforce the gun laws already on the books instead of passing new laws. Here is a New York Post story on how the rampage unfolded; it includes a timeline from New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tariffs. Bill Maher admits he was wrong about the tariffs. “If Tariffs Are So Bad, Where’s the Recession?” asks the headline on Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal. Hardly a Trump fan, Baker observes:
But even as the U.S. has been transformed in just six months into a high-tariff economy, there is scant sign of the economic disaster we were promised. Deals signed in the past week with two of our largest trading partners indicate that a 15% tariff is now the likely new floor for most U.S. imports, with higher duties still in place on some goods.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s respected foreign affairs columnist Walter Russell Meade, also hardly a Trump fan, writes about President Trump’s “trade deal triumphs.” Meade notices that our allies are making concessions and sharing burdens:
From Team Trump’s perspective, the agreements vindicate the administration’s disruptive approach. Past presidents have compartmentalized American negotiations, keeping security relations and trade negotiations on different tracks. Mr. Trump thought this was stupid. The combination of access to the American market and American security guarantees was so valuable, he believed, that foreigners would pay a much higher price than his predecessors ever got. The recent deals with the EU and Japan support his view.
The president also believes that global institutions like the World Trade Organization don’t serve American interests as well as bilateral or, in the case of the EU, regional agreements. One doesn’t need to be pro-Trump or pro-tariff to see that the WTO has disappointed the high hopes with which it was launched. The new EU and Japan trade agreements demonstrate the potential of Mr. Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott writes that Trump’s tough love policy—better known as America First—can help our allies “rediscover their economic vigor, martial strength and sense of national purpose.”
Don’t be miffed at Ms. Must for originally greeting new revelations from DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s declassified Russia hoax documents with weariness. Again? I wuz wrong. “Why Russiagate is the Scandal that Shouldn’t Go Away” is the headline on Josh Hammer’s piece at The Free Press. “Tulsi Gabbard’s fresh revelations are enough to warrant a fresh Department of Justice investigation,” Hammer argues.
The always interesting Martin Gurri writes that Russiagate had its origins in former President Obama’s bruised ego. The Federalist’s John Daniel David suggests that “the hoax is worse than you think,” while his Federalist colleague Sean Davis analyzes the fishy memo Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote to herself. Davis suggests that it shows how Trump adviser Michael Flynn was targeted during a meeting in the Oval Office.
There’s daylight between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister over this matter of whether there is starvation in Gaza. President Trump was deeply affected by the pictures of starving Gaza children. Netanyahu says there is no starvation in Gaza. Trump said:
“Based on television, I would say not particularly because those children look very hungry,” Trump said when asked if he agreed with Netanyahu. Later he said, “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can’t fake that.”
Trump is right, of course, to want to get humanitarian aid to starving people. Israel’s defenders maintain that the terrorist group Hamas is responsible for keeping Gazans away from humanitarian aid. But why are there so many noncombatants remaining in Gaza? Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online considers this:
A question haunts me: why are there still women and children in Gaza? This is a strip of land 25 miles long and seven miles wide. It’s a quarter the size of London. And for nearly two years it has been engulfed by war. An army of anti-Semites is fighting one of the dirtiest wars humanity has ever witnessed, hiding in civilian infrastructure to plot its murder of Jews. Israel is dropping bombs. There are gunfights. And there are all the horrors that attend war: death, hunger, sickness. And yet there they are, the women and children, fleeing the fighting and scrabbling for food alongside men.
The answer is that the anti-Israel bias of elite organizations prevented women and children of Gaza from seeking asylum lest the “occupying power”—as Israel is described—not be thwarted enough. In other words, they’re all hostages.
President Trump has signed an executive order that targets homelessness. Carolyn D. Gorman argues in City Journal that for the plan to succeed, the U.S. must increase the number of outpatient psychiatric beds. It was impossible to read this article without relating it to horrors such as the shooting spree yesterday in New York.
Ms. Must doesn’t want to leave you in a sad mood. Andrew Stiles’ Free Beacon piece on the continued buyouts at the Washington Post should cheer you up. It’s headlined:
RIP Democracy: Glenn Kessler, Bravest Fact-Checker in Journalism History, Exits WaPo After Taking Buyout
USA TODAY’s Ingrid Jaques will delight all night owls who dote on Gutfeld! Some meanies have tried to tell us that CBS’s firing of Stephen Colbert bodes ill for late-night television. Jaques holds up Gutfeld! as somebody who succeeds by being entertaining, which Col-bere was not.
