MSNBC Guest Says We Should Profile 'White Men' as School Shooters

If you thought the Newtown, Connecticut shooting was one place where a refuge from racial politics could be found, you were deeply mistaken. At least one commentator on MSNBC is determined to bring the subject up.

In a conversation on MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes, Salon columnist David Sirota argued that the discussion surrounding the shooting in Newtown has been spared a larger degree of ugliness by the fact that the shooter in this case - Adam Lanza - was a white man. However, Sirota did not see this as a positive. Rather, he saw it as evidence that America is willing to leap to the easy out of racial profiling for every crime except for school shootings. Why? Because school shootings, according to Sirota, are perpetrated by white people.

To that end, Sirota made the following comment while responding to the idea that the mentally ill might be followed and surveyed by the government with the same zeal as the terrorist watch list.

"The issue with it will be, politically, I think; the profile is white men. That’s a profile that’s not, essentially, in America allowed to be profiled. That’s the one profile in America that’s not allowed to be profiled.”

Moreover, Sirota fingered the Republican party as the biggest obstacle to such profiling, believing they would react to any attempt to profile mentally ill white people the same way they had reacted to the infamous Department of Homeland Security report on "right wing extremism" in America.

"The Republicans said, 'This is a way to demonize, essentially, white America, or 'good, God-fearing Americans,'" Sirota remarked.

Watch this curious outburst below, courtesy of Mediaite: