Heilemann: Mass Shootings Are an 'Emergency' — Trump Misusing Emergency Power 'Grotesque'

Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” during live coverage of an active shooter at the Henry Pratt Company in Aurora, IL, network political analyst John Heilemann said President Donald Trump’s use of his power to declare a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border was “empty symbolism” and “grotesque.” Heilemann argued the current situation is highlighting that mass shootings are an actual “emergency.” Heilemann said, “There’s a lot of ways to analyze what happened with Trump today, and we want to focus on this, but you set the backdrop and one of the ways to analyze it, we thought, talk about it as political theater, as empty symbolism, as grotesque, as inappropriate, as setting a bad precedent, as a million different things, but it set so much now in the context of this, however bad this turns out to be, another mass shooting. I’m looking at the statistics, 323 mass shootings in 2018, 323 mass shootings in 2018, that is nearly one a day in America. I don’t know what definition—I don’t know how to define an emergency. But I’ll tell you that if you listen to the experts who talk about what’s happening on the southern border and look at the number of mass shootings