On Thursday evening, Barack Obama interrupted the East Coast primetime news hour with a 15 minute press conference.

Obama called the conference to acknowledge the death of 10 Americans, including six U.S. military personnel, who were killed when their Air Force C-130 crashed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, three hours before his press conference. Except that’s not actually why he called the press conference — in fact, their commander in chief didn’t even mention them from the podium.

Instead, Obama did what Democrats do every time there’s an opportunity to assail our fundamental right to self defense with an emotionally charged “von control” appeal on the blood of innocents.

That’s right. In a crass pivot away from the catastrophic crisis he created in the Middle East (where we learned Wednesday that American and Russian fighter pilots on a collision course for direct confrontation) and ahead of a terrible economic report further affirming Obama’s domestic policy failures, he preempted the primetime news to comment on the tragic murder of nine adult students and the wounding of seven others at a Roseburg, Oregon, community college. (The MSM are reporting “10 dead” but as usual, they include the assailant who was killed by police – let’s not.)

Saying “We should politicize this,” Obama devoted only 80 of his 1,306 word diatribe to the families of those murdered. That would be 6% of his message. But as soon as he said, “our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he spoke 1,226 words about his political gun control objective to implement new gun laws.

He did not mention what new laws he wanted to add to the more than 10,000 currently on the federal, state and local books, but he did mention needing “states and legislatures” on board, which sounded a bit like he was calling for some serious revision of our Constitution’s Second Amendment.

In his pivot appeal, Obama listed the mass assaults which have occurred on his watch: “We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston.” Notably, he did not mention the armed Jihadist assaults at two other gun free installations: the murdered of 14 soldiers, security personnel and a pre-birth child at Fort Hood, Texas, and the recent murder of five military personnel in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Sidebar: On the subject of the Chattanooga assault on 16 July, it took Obama five days to order flags to half staff after that attack, and he did so reluctantly. He ordered flags down just 24 hours after the Oregon assault – in support of his “politicized” gun control agenda. For the record, after the Chattanooga assault, we lowered our flags immediately. However, we do not lower our flags in support of Obama’s political agendas.

The Oregon assailant targeted Christians for execution and associated with at least one known Islamic extremists, but Obama did not mention that.

It is also notable that Oregon Army National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, one of the young men who stopped the Islamist assault on a Paris last month, is a student at Umpqua Community College. Likewise, one of Skarlatos’ fellow students, Army veteran Chris Mintz, was shot five times while trying to defend his classmates much as Skarlatos had done in Paris. But Obama did not mention those details either.

Moments after Obama’s remarks, Steve Hayes, senior editor for The Weekly Standard, boldly expressed my own sentiments: “[Obama] has had an avalanche of bad news over the past 36 hours and I think he is using this shooting to get out from under it. … He’s the one that said we should ‘politicize’ this. Well he did. He’s distracting attention from his other problems.”

Indeed, he disgracefully did just that.

Most of the media talkingheads noted variations on this theme: “Obama is passionate about this issue.” No, Obama and his Leftist NeoCom cadres are passionate about increasing the power of the state, and the biggest obstacle to subordinating the American people to this statist agenda is the Second Amendment. When they say “commonsense gun laws” they mean “gun confiscation laws.”

The inconvenient truth about guns is, as the number of legally owned guns has increased, violent crime has decreased, according to the FBI’s statistics — continuing a 12-year decline.

Of course, in those states and cities with the most restrictive gun laws, violent crime is thriving. In Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago, almost 3,000 people have been murdered since Obama took office — and almost all of those murders were related to gang violence. However, Chicago ranks high among those cities with the most restrictive gun laws in the nation.

Likewise, Oregon has universal background checks, and Umpqua Community College is a “gun free zones,” where victims are prohibited from the most effective means of self defense.

In his parting remarks, Obama said, “[T]ally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side.” He lamented the fact that we spend so much on counterterrorism efforts.

But if Obama really wants to “tally up some numbers,” how about starting with the fact that in five states alone (Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas), more than 5,400 people have been murdered by illegal aliens. That is more than all Americans killed defending our nation against terrorism in both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Or maybe Obama would like to post a comparison with the 327,000 children who are killed on Planned Parenthood’s abortion tables every year, 900 of whom died just yesterday in PP clinics.

For the record, “The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. … [T]he advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any.” —James Madison (1788)