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(Photo: Darryle Carter/flickr)

No, Bill O'Reilly, Bloody Las Vegas Massacre Is Not "Price of Freedom"

"Mass shootings are not the price of freedom," responded one among countless critics outraged by the former Fox News anchor. "They're the price civilians pay so that GOP blood stained pockets remain full from the NRA."

Common Dreams staff

After former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly—ousted from his nightly show earlier this year following allegations of sexual harassment—described the blood-soaked massacre at a Las Vegas music festival on Sunday night that left 59 people dead and hundreds wounded as "the price of freedom," the good people of the nation had a simple response: No, you heartless and mindless idiot.

"Once again," O'Reilly wrote on his personal blog Monday, "the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display." Later, he argued that mass murder at the hands of people with automatic assault rifles is simply "the price of freedom" because "violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are."

Though a classic construction of right-wing demagoguery, that thinking is betrayed by serious academic research which shows that when strict gun control laws are put in place, these kinds of attacks are incredibly rare compared to what the United States—hostage as it is to the nation's gun industry lobby and the NRA—has been forced to experience in recent decades.

Meanwhile, on social media, O'Reilly (aka, "Satan" and a "POS") was told in nearly countless ways to simply STFU and go away:

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