Conservatives are passing around this video of Bill Stevens's snotty testimony to Congress on gun control. (A note overlaid onto the video even reads "...every American needs to think like this man!" Which is a truly chilling sentence.)

The problem, as Mark Joseph Stern points out, is that Stevens ties himself to the Sandy Hook massacre by using oblique language stating that his daughter was "was in lockdown" as the shooting happened. Technically, this is true. His daughter was in lockdown. But she was not a Sandy Hook student, as the title of this video claims. Stevens's daughter was in lockdown at Reed Intermediate School, which, according to Google Maps, is about 3 miles away from Sandy Hook Elementary.

I'm not trying to say that Stevens had no right to testify before Congress. And I'm not saying that he intentionally misled anyone. But I am saying that it would have been perfectly reasonable for conservatives to label this video "Newtown Father Owns Congress." But they didn't. And the fact is, a video labeled "Newtown Father Owns Congress" simply wouldn't have gathered as many views—nearly 2.5 million!—as a video labeled "Sandy Hook Father Owns Congress." Purposeful or not, it's a smarmy bit of misdirection that capitalizes on tragedy.