The same Republicans who express appropriate outrage over President Obama’s shameless demagoguery on gun control should reconsider their own exploitative oversimplification of the similarly tortured question of illegal immigration.

In reacting to the horrifying shootings in Oregon, the president declared: “This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America.” The implication is that mass shootings would wondrously cease if only “common sense gun regulation” became the law of the land. The evidence for this childlike belief is just about non-existent because some of the most hideous mass murders of recent years have occurred in communities such as Newtown, Conn., or Roseburg, Ore., located in liberal states with some of the tightest gun controls in the country. With his rhetoric, Obama seems to suggest that corrupt conservatives are deliberately concealing a big, easily graspable lever secretly located somewhere on Capitol Hill that, if pulled by majorities in both houses of Congress, would easily and instantly put an end to shooting sprees on campuses….

….Read the full column at USA TODAY.