On Wednesday, Geraldo Rivera reminded everyone of the importance of waiting for facts before tweeting:
The key now is for us to be as outraged by San Bernadino massacre as we would be if Muslim extremists were doing the killing. This is terror
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) December 2, 2015
The tweet went out at 6:53 p.m. Eastern on the day of the attack. Very few facts were known at that time--CNN had reported that one or two of the suspects were dead (with another possibly in custody), and no physical description of the suspects (just their clothes, weirdly enough) had been released. The first suspect's name wouldn't be released for another two hours. Nothing was publicly known at that time regarding the religious beliefs of the perpetrators--they could have been anything from Congregationalists to Hindus to Rastafarians to Muslims.
As it would have been irresponsible at the time to have declared the act was Islamic terrorism, it was equally irresponsible to declare that it wasn't.
Anyhow, in light of recent revelations that one of the shooters pledged allegiance to ISIS on Facebook during the attack, it appears that Rivera's tweet was at least partly correct: this was, indeed, terrorism.
Now that is has become clear that Muslim extremists were indeed the ones doing the killing in San Bernardino, Rivera has yet to offer suggestions about how outraged people should be in reaction. He's just continued to blame guns...even though the shooters were also armed to the teeth with explosives, and California has the strictest gun laws on the books already.
.@GeraldoRivera: GunsRUs? In America the #gun store never closes https://t.co/3S4fEILey8 pic.twitter.com/pBWfvuC4La
— Fox News Latino (@foxnewslatino) December 4, 2015
USA has betw 300-400 million weapons in private hands-5 to 10 million more are produced each year. How many is too many? How many is enough?
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) December 4, 2015
Don't let facts get in the way of one's narrative, apparently.
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