China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday tried to score a few political points from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, quoting “Chinese analysts” who said the killing proved “solutions to gun violence still remain out of reach.”
The Chinese Communist paper mostly quoted politically useful snippets from an Associated Press (AP) report, such as a passage that tried to pass off the Democrat Party’s frantic “both sides” rhetoric to obscure the extremely left-wing slant to political violence in the United States today.
“The report by AP News noted that the circumstances of the shooting drew renewed attention to an escalating threat of political violence in the U.S. that in the last several years has cut across the ideological spectrum,” the Global Times chittered.
In a similar vein, some Democrats have predictably used Kirk’s murder to push their gun-control talking points, even though the assassin reportedly used a common type of hunting rifle that is legal even in many countries with strict gun laws.
The Global Times boosted this Democrat rhetoric to paint Kirk as a human sacrifice to America’s “gun violence” problem:
These shootings in the U.S. are no longer limited to isolated or extreme incidents like past school shootings targeting specific groups, such as young people. Instead, they are increasingly evolving into retaliatory actions or acts of political violence directed at both political parties or specific political figures, Zhu Ying, a professor at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times on Thursday.
Echoing Zhu, Jia Chunyang, research fellow at Development Research Center of the State Council, citing Trump’s deployment of the National Guard soldiers to Washington, DC, said that within the context of the bipartisan politics in the U.S., the political landscape has become increasingly polarized and even violent in the country.
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Whenever a mass shooting or politically motivated gun violence occurs, politicians often call for stricter gun control measures. However, the actual implementation of these measures is hampered by the deep-seated distrust many Americans have towards their government, making gun control in the U.S. both a constitutional and a social challenge, Zhu added.
While trolling through American media for slop to include in an opportunistic editorial about Kirk’s murder, the Global Times even stumbled across the left-wing meme that Kirk’s death was fitting or delightfully ironic because he opposed gun control, and they decided to repeat it:
Kirk has shown right-wing activist’s stances on opposing gun control previously. A few months ago, Kirk said: “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” the BBC reported.
The Global Times must have been in quite a hurry to get its article posted, because it forgot to mention the wave of mass-casualty attacks sweeping China over the past few years. Most of them were knife attacks and they frequently targeted children.
Likewise, the Global Times forgot to mention that China’s government frequently uses force to silence speech it dislikes and make the speakers disappear, a policy that Kirk’s killer would doubtless applaud.
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