UPDATE: Yeah, so, it’s also too soon for fundraising letters and emails. Please stop.
The call for help after U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot at baseball practice for a Congressional baseball game came in at 7:09 a.m. east coast time. At 5:50 a.m. Colorado time (or 7:50 a.m. on the east coast), Safe Campus Colorado, founded by Congressional District Two candidate Ken Toltz, posted a tweet politicizing the terrible shooting. In the tweet, Safe Campus Colorado, a group dedicated to restricting the Second Amendment on college campuses, compared Sen. Rand Paul’s statement that he thought the assailant used an AR-15 in today’s shooting with Ken Buck posing with an AR-15. See below.
It’s this kind of rhetoric that ProgressNow complained about during the Planned Parenthood shooting – this overheated stuff meant to gin up feelings of discontent among the organization’s base. And it’s not even that the content was so bad, but seriously – not even an hour had passed before Safe Campus Colorado was capitalizing on this tragedy. That’s just gross.
It’s unclear whether Toltz is in charge of his group’s Twitter account, but is the leader of the organization and, as such, is held responsible for the group’s actions. Nonetheless, he’s shown that he’s unfit to run for office since the tweet is still up.
At the very least, Toltz needs to apologize to the victims of today’s shooting.