As Fox News’ Shep Smith was covering the events of Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, he presented a statement from President Obama, live on the air during his coverage.
“President Obama called today for a bipartisan effort at every level of government to address mass shootings,” Smith began. Quoting President Obama directly, he continued, “We don’t yet know what the motives of the shooters are, but what we do know is that there are steps we can take to make America safer and that we should come together on a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these rare as opposed to normal. We should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events because it does not happen with the same frequency in other countries.”
The reporting of this was all very normal, even for Fox, up to this point. However, the good part came when Shep then continued to add his own remarks, off script, in response to President Obama’s statement:
[President Obama] mentioned something of this nature when he was in Paris just the other day, for the International Climate Summit.
[President Obama] got a lot of partisan pushback on that from his political opponents but the fact of the matter is, among developed nations, that’s the truth. These sorts of mass shooting with the regularity of where they occur in the United States — you don’t find that in other countries… you can extrapolate what you want. I can report to you with certainty that it happens more here than anywhere else in the world.
How or why Fox keeps Shep around is a mystery, since he does things like use facts when reporting. However, he is completely correct on this one. We have literally had more mass shootings in 2015 than days have passed in the year. It isn’t “liberal bias” or some sort of propaganda generated by Democrats to take away someone’s guns. The response to Shep from Republicans on social media was typical. They have done everything from call Shep “gay”, as if that is some insult and relevant to his opinion, to calling him an “Obama-planted Socialist.” Their hate is the best answer you can give someone when they ask why America does nothing about the issue of gun violence in America.
Listen to Shep’s comments from his newscast below:
Featured image via Mediaite screen capture
