Fox News Guest Claims Mass Shooters Were ‘Scared to Come Out’ Before Covid Vaccine: ‘You Can Be Sure They Probably Got Vaccinated’
On Wednesday, a public transit worker allegedly shot eight people to death and then himself in a rail yard in San Jose, California. The suspect, 57-year-old Sam James Cassidy, worked for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which serves San Jose and Silicon Valley.
During Fox News’s live coverage of massacre, former NYPD detective Pat Brosnan made an utterly bizarre statement in which he claimed that getting the Covid-19 vaccine will somehow embolden would-be mass shooters.
Anchor Harris Faulkner began by asking Brosnan about the close proximity of a sheriff’s office next door to the rail yard and asked him how that might have made a difference in terms of the speed and nature of the police’s response to the shooting.
Brosnan gave a weird and barely intelligible response in which he sarcastically referenced “the summer of love 2020,” an allusion to the mass protests that happened across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Brosnan seemed to argued that supposedly lax law enforcement has sent a message to potential mass shooters that “crimes are no longer illegal”:
I think there would be more nuanced response in terms of opening a shooting – an active shooting – right next door to where there’s a load of armed professional shooters under law enforcement. But the rules have changed, you know? Crimes are no longer illegal. There’s no longer enforcement of lots of laws and there’s an empowerment of these active shooters.
Then in the very next breath, Brosnan suggested that would-be shooters “were scared to come out” before the Covid-19 vaccine became available:
And you know, Harris, this is a time that I wish I was wrong with my prediction, which I mention to anybody who’d listen, that once Covid starts to lift, these cowardly shooters will come out exactly in tandem with the number of vaccinations. You can be sure they probably got vaccinated. They were just scared to come out. And they’re coming back, and you see the numbers don’t lie. The shootings are up dramatically – skyrocketing, actually – on active shootings throughout the United States as we’ve come through this pandemic. It’s really terrifying stuff.
It’s true that mass shootings and crime in general have risen in many places across the United States, and it’s quite possible this is the natural result of increased human activity and interaction as pandemic restrictions ease. However, the idea that mass shooters, who often end up dead or injured either by their own weapons or by police’s, were holding back for fear of getting Covid-19 seems light-years past what could be reasonably called ‘a stretch.’
Brosnan has his own experience with a hail of gunfire. In 1995, he and another NYPD detective, James Crowe, responded to a tip that a robbery at an apartment in the Bronx would take place. Two men had come to the building allegedly to get money from a man they believed had scammed one of their girlfriends. Brosnan and Crowe arrived and told the men to get on the ground, before opening fire. The men were lying face down on the ground when they were fatally shot. One victim was shot eight times in the back, while the other was shot 14 times, mostly in the back.
Police said the suspects were armed, but they did not fire. At the time, the shootings sparked protests in the city against then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose head of security during his 1993 mayoral campaign was Pat Brosnan. A Bronx grand jury declined to indict the detectives.
In 2009, the city of New York paid $1.15 million to the victims’ families to settle a lawsuit.
Watch above via Fox News.
