Open Mouth, Insert Foot?

I like Joe Scarborough, but he put his foot in it this morning with that ham handed attempt to draw parallels between the Aurora shooter and autism. I read a brief tweet about the incident this morning but didn’t see the comment in context until this evening when I got home.

You have these people that are somewhere, I believe, probably on the autism scale, I don’t know if that’s the case here, but it happens more often than not, people that can walk around in society, that can function on college campuses, can even excel in college campuses, but are socially disconnected. I have a son who has Asperger’s who is loved by everyone in his family and who is wonderful, but it is for those that may not have a loving family and a support group and may be a bit further along on the autism spectrum, an extraordinarily frustrating, terrible challenge day in and day out. and so, I do think, again, I don’t know the specifics about this young man, but we see too many shooters in these type of tragedies bearing the same characteristics mentally.

I won’t go nuclear on him like Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher did. It was a dumb thing to say but I’m not going to make a criminal case out of it.

What is bizarre to me is this ill-advised comment came out of Joe’s mouth today. Not Friday, when this all went down and people are more likely to make snap analysis calls that might prove to be a bad idea later on, but today…three days later when rational thoughts usually prevail.

Predictably, some who have a vested interest in people with Autism have been none too pleased with Scarborough’s comment. I don’t blame them for feeling that way. Joe should probably apologize for his inartful phrasing but that’s about as much contrition as I believe is warranted, especially given that Joe is the parent of an autistic child. He did a dumb thing. I’m sure he knows it. Do the apology and move forward.