By James Bovard
The White House announced that there will be a seat left vacant in the gallery during Obama’s State of the Union Address "for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice." This old stunt is part of Obama’s campaign for new federal restrictions on firearms ownership, but if he really wanted to provide a voice for those who've lost theirs, at least in part, due to his own administration's policies, he'd have to empty all the seats in the gallery reserved for the first lady and her guests.
While trumpeting the private death toll from guns, Obama on Tuesday night will likely ignore the 986 people killed by police in the United States last year according to The Washington Post's database. Many police departments are aggressive — if not reckless — in part because the Justice Department always provides cover for them at the Supreme Court. Obama’s "Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way" to a Supreme Court hearing, The New York Times noted last year. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said that federally-funded police agencies should not even be required to report the number of civilians they kill.
To add a Euro flair to the evening, Obama could drape tri-color flags on a few empty seats to commemorate the 30 French medical staff, patients, and others slain last Oct. 3 when an American AC-130 gunship blasted their well-known hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The U.S. military revised its story several times but admitted in November that the carnage was the result of "avoidable ... human error." Regrettably, that bureaucratic phrase lacks the power to resurrect victims.
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