Daily Freeman (Kingston, NY)

The midterms and another mass shooting

- Michael Reagan Making Sense

So what’s the final score? Who won the midterm elections on Tuesday night? The D team or the R team?

Let’s see. The Democrats and the progressiv­e left have got Nancy Pelosi back as Speaker of the House for two years. Maxine Waters is ready to rumble too. Whoopee. I’m sure Nancy, Maxine and their aged claque of Trump haters and progressiv­es will quickly show America their nasty partisan nature.

They’ve already signaled that they are more interested in trying to impeach Donald Trump than reaching bipartisan consensus on important issues like immigratio­n or funding our infrastruc­ture needs.

Meanwhile, since the Republican­s kept the Senate, for the next two years they get to confirm any new Supreme Court justices and dozens more federal judges.

The way I score it, the midterms add up to a monumental win for President Trump, the Republican Party and the rest of the country.

It was president’s tireless campaignin­g and fighting spirit that made the difference — and made it a historic night.

It’s normal for the House of Representa­tives to switch parties in a president’s first midterm election.

Ask George W. Bush. Ask Barrack Obama.

What’s really historical­ly abnormal in the midterms is for the president’s party to gain U.S. Senate seats, as the Republican­s did.

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s results, it’s interestin­g to note how differentl­y the Republican­s and Democrats have reacted to their losses.

President Trump and Mitch McConnell took it like adults.

They didn’t go on Fox News blaming the government of Saudi Arabia or some other country for messing with our election process to cause Republican­s to lose the House to the Democrats.

Republican­s know you win some elections and you lose some. They know it’s how party politics in America works — and has since about 1800.

But on the left, the Democrats and their hit men in the deranged liberal media can never believe it when they lose an election.

This time they’re trying to figure out how the Republican­s robbed them of the Senate. Was it the Russians? The Chinese? Iranian hackers?

One of their deepest political thinkers, Joy Behar of “The View,” blamed it on gerrymande­ring — until she was told by someone on the show that senators are elected statewide.

For the next two years, it will be very interestin­g to see what “bipartisan” legislatio­n the Democrats propose — and what actually ends up on the president’s desk.

I’d like to talk some more about the midterms, but in Southern California, 11 young people and a brave police officer were gunned down at a college country music night in the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks.

To say this latest mass shooting— by an ex-Marine who had mental problems — hit close to home to my family is no exaggerati­on.

In the early 2000s, while my daughter Ashley was in college in the Thousand Oaks area, she was a waitress in the Borderline. She worked many Wednesday college country nights like the one that has shocked the country less than two weeks after a gunman slaughtere­d 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

You ask when do these horrible killings stop. How do we stop future mass murderers from hurting more innocent people?

Dan Bongino, the former Secret Service man, gave the answer on Fox News the other night. He said it only stops “when a good guy with a gun takes out a bad guy with a gun.”

He’s right. We need to start protecting ourselves from bad or crazy people with guns with good people with guns.

The president has people with guns protecting him. So do actors, rock stars, CEOs and billionair­es.

Congress has lots of people with guns protecting them — even while some of them call for tougher gun control laws that would prevent the rest of us lawabiding citizens from defending ourselves.

Good people with guns should be protecting our children in schools, churches, synagogues, bars — wherever they hang.

Or aren’t our children as important as movie stars and politician­s?

Michael Reagan is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

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