“How dare you. You think we don’t have hearts?” screeched Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert during this morning’s House hearing on gun control.
In point of fact, we do think that. What other possible conclusion is there when an entire party refuses to take any action to keep Americans safe from being shot in their homes, churches, schools, hospitals, malls, and movie theaters? If your “family values” require children to go to school in a war zone so that you can amass a stockpile of cool murder sticks, then, yeah, you have no heart. Would a person with a functioning heart look at 19 dead kids and insist that it was more important for teenagers to be able to wander around with weapons of war strapped to their bodies than for kindergartners to be able to go to school without coming home in body bags? Not likely!
And yet there was Gohmert, howling away that it was really the Democrats who kill people, not ready access to automatic weapons.
“We care about people. We care about their lives, and lives have been so trivialized. We care deeply. How dare you. How dare you, you arrogant people, attributing murder to those of us that want to do things to stop it,” he said, without explaining exactly what he and his party were doing to “stop it,” adding, “Because we’ve seen what your ideas do, they create more murder.”
Haha, remember when Bill Clinton passed that assault weapons ban and it created more murder? Or, you know, the opposite of that.
There have been at least 17 mass shootings in America since an 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde, Texas, murdered 19 fourth graders and two teachers last week. Republicans have offered many explanations for the ongoing carnage, including abortion, video games, wokeness, mental health, and doors. Guns appear nowhere on this list, although America, a country awash in firearms, is the only place where this happens every goddamn day.
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“What good would laws do,” ask the same people passing draconian bills to regulate uteruses. Of course, the Uvalde shooter waited until he was 18 and could legally buy the murder weapon, but that’s just, like, new math, or whatever.
Republicans have made totally clear that they’re not going to shit to stop this plague of murders.
“We can do a lot of things, and Texas has done a lot of things after the Santa Fe shooting,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson. “Obviously we have to do more. We have to harden these targets so no one can get in ever except from one entrance.”
Why would an elementary school be a “target”? And if there are so many people targeting schools, why would we do nothing to stop these maniacs from buying guns that can fire a shitload of bullets in rapid succession?
These are questions that do not trouble today’s GOP. In fact, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has virtually guaranteed that nothing will get in the way of Texans’ ability to purchase high capacity firearms and a mountain of ammo with no waiting period.
He recently called for a committee to study school safety and mass violence. Safe bet this vaunted committee, assuming it does anything at all, will not call for gun control legislation. But even if it did, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference because committees, like every public space in America, are where things go to die. If Abbott were remotely seriously about doing something, he’d have called the legislature into special session. The way he just did when they had to enact “emergency” legislation on so-called voter integrity and the frightening scourge of transgender kids existing.
Meanwhile in the Senate, Mitch McConnell has signaled his seriousness of purpose by deputizing Texas Sen. John Cornyn to negotiate some kind of gun safety bill. Cornyn, whose sanity is only measurable by comparison to Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert, will no doubt propose a red flag bill on trans kids buying guns, and then accuse Democrats of sabotaging bipartisan efforts when they refuse to go along with it.
It’s a brutal, brutal country, filled with rugged individualists, AKA selfish assholes.
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