Candidates Exploit Shootings While Families Mourn

Tweeted from Governor Christies Twitter Account

Tweeted from Governor Christie’s Twitter Account

In the wake of every mass shooting, presidential candidates take to Twitter to condemn the shooter and to send support to the affected families. Every candidate has the same semi-generic response of “thoughts and prayers to the victims/victims families.” This response has good intentions, but after every shooting with the same thing being constantly repeated, it loses its well-intended meaning.

Candidates then use the shootings to either hold up their party’s belief or slam the other parties belief. “Any event that [occurs] during a presidential primary is transferred into a platform,” said Kim Owens, a government teacher. This quick response of pushing a platform to get more votes in a primary is just crass.

Shootings in America should not be used as a platform, but as a reality check that no matter what matter you associate with, the shootings are a plague on American society that need to be stopped somehow, and tweeting about what you want to do to change it but not acting on your actions is not helping the situation at all.

Some of the reasons that candidates respond so politically is because during the primary season the votes that count for the candidates are the extreme voters who have some of the most radical views of their parties.

Tweeted from Hillary Clinton's Twitter Account
Tweeted from Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Account

The primary votes are split into parties and the most apparent group of voter turnout for each party are the extremes. The candidates rely on  these votes to get the delegates so they can get nominated as their parties final candidate. They use the shootings to get responses out of their constituents so they can grab that vote .

This also applies during the actual election season. Candidates gear their speeches and responses to the majority’s opinion of their party.They do this because if they were to keep reaching for the radical vote they would not get nearly enough votes to win the election.

It’s just too soon.

All presidential candidates take advantage of tragedies to help them gain support in the polls and to win the Oval Office, and what they really should do is press pause and take a moment to realize that people are dead and that families have been torn apart.

Candidates should hold off on the platform creating, and do more mourning for the loss of life that occurred, and after time has passed, they should address the issues that their party believes caused the shooting.

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