Right-wing site Breitbart defends assault weapons and attacks Highland Park hours after tragedy

The right-wing extremist website Breitbart.com covered Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s angry response to the mass murder at a July 4th parade today that left six dead and 19 wounded in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

It began with straight news coverage of Pritzker’s remarks.

“Grief will not bring the victims back, and prayers alone will not put a stop to the terror of rampant gun violence in our country,” Pritzker said. “I will stand firm with Illinoisans and Americans: we must – and we will – end this plague of gun violence.”

That apparently was offensive enough to Breitbart editors that they ignored the Right’s “now is not the time to politicize this tragedy” trope invoked after countless acts of gun violence. In fact, Breitbart wasn’t about to let taste or respect for the grieving, shattered community get in its way.

“As Breitbart News previously reported, the local jurisdiction of Highland Park already “banned ‘assault weapons’ and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition” and that the “U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the law in 2015.” Legal analyst Ken Klukowski of Breitbart News wrote at the time of the decision that Highland Park ‘has a long track record of opposing citizens exercising the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms’ through the banning of so-called ‘assault weapons.’

“Assault weapons are not an actual class of firearms,” Klukowski argued. “The term is often confused with ‘assault rifles,’ which are a class of firearms. But for most such bans, ‘assault weapons’ excludes some types of assault rifles and includes guns that are not assault rifles.”

Also, with no sense of shame or irony, Breitbart took a strange dig at the Illinois governor.

“Pritzker concluded his statement with a call to end the “terror of rampant gun violence in our country” while stopping short of any gun control policy prescriptions.”

As if Breitbart would cover them if he had.