Beck is right: Shootings are no coincidence

The National Rifle Association's annual meeting wraps up today in Houston, after having opened Friday before the smoke had even cleared from a Houston airport shootout.

Police say 29-year-old Carnell Moore walked into Bush International Airport on Thursday and fired a pistol into the ceiling. It wasn't clear as of this writing whether he died by his own hand or from shots fired by federal agents. They found a fully-loaded Smith & Wesson AR-15 in a nearby suitcase. They say a suicide note suggested he had planned to kill others, but changed his mind.

"Here in the last hour, I yield to mercy when this could have turned bad," Moore is said to have written. "Jehovah found a path to my heart, that love would conquer anger." He wrote of a monster inside him that was getting stronger; said that while he couldn't save himself, he could spare others, according to released passages from the note.

There was no early evidence that Moore's actions were at all related to the conference, expected to draw 70,000 to the one-time capitol of the Republic of Texas.

That didn't stop conservative talk show host and career conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck -- keynote speaker for the conference's "Stand and Fight" rally -- from publicly speculating the man's apparent public suicide was a big setup to demonize gun owners in order to whittle away at Second Amendment rights.

Beck, obviously clairvoyant, saw no reason to wait for facts to cloud conclusions: Moore was unemployed, depressed, convinced by someone to turn his suicide into a statement.

"If I were a journalist -- let me correct that -- if I were an honest journalist, I would be looking for these connections. Look for the connections of who this man is and any connection he might have to the uber-Left," he said during a live broadcast from the George R. Brown Convention Center just hours after the shooting.

"I believe that's probably -- I shouldn't say that," Beck qualified. "I believe it is a very good chance that is what happened."

I guess those ultra-Libs also must have recruited the person who shot and killed Cortez Rucker and another man on that same night in Cleveland. And the 42-year-old man who was shot and killed in Philadelphia. And whoever shot and killed a 48-year-old father who was on his way to work early the next morning just north of Houston. And maybe, even, 5-year-old Kristian Sparks, who shot and killed his 2-year-old sister, Caroline, early in the week while playing with a rifle outside their Kentucky home. I could go on.

Beck is right about one thing: It's not a coincidence that so many people died looking down the barrel of a gun last week. Or any week.

The NRA's incomprehensible answer? Stand and fight.

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