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Is there anything more predictable than people using a hot news story to promote whatever political agenda they wanted to push anyway?

The tragic shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Monday is the latest example of this ugly partisan tendency. The bodies weren’t even cold before progressives started calling for more gun control. I started seeing calls for gun control on Facebook from progressives while the story was still being sorted out. Nobody knew whether there was one shooter or up to three of them, but lack of facts about what happened didn’t stop people from turning to their political agendas.

The news media can almost always be counted on to get something egregiously wrong in a story about guns. CNN provided the shocking moment of ignorance Monday when it referred to the weapon used as an “AR15 shotgun.” The AR-15 is one of the “assault weapons” that media frequently use to demonize guns of all sort, but it wasn’t even used in this shooting. It’s a specific type of weapon — and it’s not a shotgun — but that mention is enough to subtly embed fear of such a weapon into those who might have seen the graphic on the screen. Was it an accident? Yes. Was it inexcusable ignorance by people who don’t have a clue about guns? Yes.

For his part, Barack Obama quickly launched into a call for more gun control. (Oddly, he didn’t say anything about how this black shooter might look something like his son, if he had a son.) The gunman used a shotgun that he bought legally, because there was nothing about him that would have flagged him for the sort of background checks that progressives keep claiming will stop shootings. That didn’t stop Obama from pretending that his existing agenda would have stopped the shooting.

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If it weren’t for hateful bigots, I wouldn’t have any idea who the new Miss America is.

It’s hard for me to care one way or the other about who wins beauty pageants. (Excuse me. “Scholarship pageants.”) But the level of ignorance and bigotry involved in some people complaining because a woman of Indian ancestry won is disturbing.

After Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America Sunday night, racist bigots took to Twitter to denounce an “Arab” — yes, seriously — winning the title. The sorts of people who would attack her for having Indian ancestry are the sorts who wouldn’t understand that India isn’t home to Arabs.

After Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America in 1983, some people grumbled, but they didn’t have the Internet to spread their bigotry for the whole world to see. I didn’t care one way or the other at the time, but some people did. They just didn’t like the idea of a black woman being held up as our ideal woman. (Don’t we all have a different idea of who the ideal woman is?)

The pageant isn’t “Miss White Girl Who Looks Like Me,” so it’s natural that people from different backgrounds are going to win. I assume that Davuluri was the best contestant this year. I don’t have a clue, but I also don’t have an opinion about who should have won last year or the year before that or pretty much any other year.

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Over the weekend, a woman in California killed her two children in a motel room and then wrecked her car in an attempt to kill herself. She then tried to choke herself, but she was rescued. On the way to a hospital, she told police where to find her dead children. We don’t know much about her other than that she lives in Arizona and was driving a car with Georgia license plates.

Stories such as this are gut-wrenching for most of us, because it’s one of our most basic instincts to protect children and save them from harm. We tend to assume this is just a snap decision by someone who’s mentally ill. But other stories are even more horrific — and long term.

When Jonathan Adleta’s girlfriend, Sarah, got pregnant, he wouldn’t agree to marry her until she agreed that he could engage in “daddy-daughter sex” with the girl after she was born. They married and Adleta abused the child. His wife was expected to engaged in sex with a son when they had one in the future. The pair are on trial now after their crimes were discovered. (That’s their mugshots above.)

Parents fail in horrific ways all the time, some of which are criminal acts, but most of which are legal, but still damaging to children. For those of us who reject the legitimacy of the state, this brings up an uncomfortable and difficult question. If we reject the state, who is to protect children? Who is to step in when monsters such as the Adletas hurt their children? And who is to make decisions when parents are making crazy decisions that damage their kids?

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