Bill O’Reilly has done it again!
Even off the air… even when he no longer has a primetime show on cable… even when he’s been supposedly cast off to the wilderness… he’s STILL found a way to trigger liberals.
And all he did was share a basic truth about the nature of the liberties we all enjoy, calling the Las Vegas gun massacre “the big downside of American freedom.”
He was referring to Sunday night’s deadly shooting spree, in which Stephen Paddock locked himself in a suite on a high floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino and opened fire on a crowd at a concert below.
The former Fox News host was just pointing out the undeniable truth that all rights come with risks.
With the right to bear arms comes the risk that lunatics will also use those arms.
“This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are,” O’Reilly wrote. “The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”
O’Reilly also predicted – correctly – that the slaughter would be immediately politicized.
“Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarizing and emotional that little will be accomplished as there is no common ground,” he wrote. “The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned.”
Again, nothing outrageous there. If anything, O’Reilly is staking out the middle ground, with a follow-up message calling on states to craft their own gun laws within the framework of the Second Amendment.
“What works in Arizona, for example, may not work in New York,” he wrote. “Americans have a right to decide for themselves what kind of public safety they want.”
Yet angry liberals are so triggered that they did their favorite thing.
They started a petition!
They’re so stark raving mad over O’Reilly’s comments that they are trying to shut him down… which is a bit of a problem when you consider that he already is largely shut down.
He lost his Fox News show earlier this year in a cloud of unproven sexual harassment allegations.
So what do they want to do to him now – put some duct tape across his mouth? Have his keyboard taken away so he can’t blog anymore?
No, now they’re going after his live stage show, with some 50,000 people signing a call for theaters to cancel his appearances.
And that makes no sense by any logic.
His live show is a ticketed event attended by willing fans. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to buy a ticket.
It’s the very intersection of the free market and free speech.
The left, of course, is showing again that they’re against both.
It seems they only respect the right to free speech when it’s speech they agree with.
But if emerging reports are any indication, there may be a lot more petitions in their future: O’Reilly is rumored to be in talks to return to television in what would no doubt be must-see TV for both the left and the right.
–The Horn editorial team