It’s Time for Media to Ignore Manuel Oliver

I’m highly sympathetic toward the loss Manuel Oliver experienced. I can’t imagine losing my son. It would be horrific, to say the least.

But the truth of the matter is that no amount of loss is justification for being an ass, which is pretty much Oliver’s MO since his son was murdered in the Parkland massacre in 2018.

From being crass enough to get ejected from a White House event that resulted in gun control, to using an AI version of his dead son to push an anti-gun agenda, the man isn’t being a decent human being.

And yet, the media still treats him like he’s worth listening to.

The father of a Parkland school shooting victim has pleaded with President Trump for gun reforms following the Minneapolis shooting on Wednesday.

Manuel Oliver spoke out after a shooter stormed a church in the south side of Minneapolis earlier that day, killing two children and injuring 17, 14 of whom were children.

For Oliver, the scenes of Wednesday’s tragedy were all too familiar, after he lost his son, Joaquin “Guac” Oliver, when a gunman entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018, and killed 17 people.

…

However, Oliver pleaded with the president, praising Trump’s ability “to do things” on his own accord, and demanded that he now prioritize desperately needed gun reforms.

“I have a message for the president,” he began, “You can make things happen. You can actually stop this from happening, and there is no political risk here because you’re still going to be the president for the next three years. So this is the time for us to change things,” he said.

“I think that President Trump can do this, and it’s coming from me,” Oliver doubled down.

And this is one of the saner things Oliver has done since Parkland.

Look, the guy lost what mattered most. I get it. 

Still, he’s not a rational voice for gun control. His every action shows that of someone who is completely unhinged. He wants gun restrictions, telling CNN that since Parkland, 350,000 people have been shot, but ignoring how many of those were shot with guns obtained via illegal means, by people who were already prohibited from owning guns, or anything else.

Because he’s not rational, so he doesn’t recognize that stuff like this matters.

So why does the media keep going to an obviously emotional, mentally unhealthy individual?

The answer is that they know he’ll say what they want to hear. He’ll say something quotable that may well go viral, and that people will hate-watch it on YouTube or somewhere else, if for no other reason than to rip his comments to shreds.

What they need to do is leave the man in peace, even if he doesn’t want that, and let him heal from his loss.

Stop taking this man seriously. Stop giving him an opportunity to revisit the old wounds and to make new mistakes that he’ll likely regret later on. As it is, he has plenty to have to come to terms with should he ever regain rationality, so stop giving him more to have to deal with should that day come.

And until then, he’s too irrational to offer anything meaningful to the debate anyway, so that’s as good a reason as any to let him be.

Editor’s Note: We can’t ban our way to safety, but anti-gun activists are intent on trying. 

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