The GOP is heading towards a disaster they may not easily recover from. In the last couple of weeks, they seem to have ratcheted up the crazy to a level beyond their typical insanity. As a good friend of mine put it, "It's like they've all contracted syphilis and have gone completely nuts."
Following yet another mass shooting in Oregon leaving nine people dead and several injured, the GOP has, yet again, turned on the platitude generator, prepared their excuses, and spewed out another plethora of idiotic comments. That shooting was number 264 of the mass shootings in 274 days this year.
In the arena of GOP presidential contenders responding to the shooting, front runner Donald Trump thinks "these things happen"; Jeb!, polling fourth in his own state of Florida, said "stuff happens"; and Ben Carson, who is somehow in second place, thinks that the students and teachers should have rushed the guy who reportedly owned 13 weapons, saying that he would "not just stand there and let him shoot me."
Carson also defended his comments later in the week on FOX saying, "But, you know, these incidents continue to occur. I doubt that this will be the last one. I want to plant the seed in people's minds so that if this happens again, you know, they don't all get killed."
See? He's planting a seed so that the next time this is inevitably going to happen, and it will according to the guy who's in second place, people will remember what he said and run towards an insane gunman with an assault rifle that shoots 700 rounds per minute. Apparently it's okay if some of them get killed. That's just the price of freedom.
The AR-15 is the favorite amongst school shooters and second amendment crazies. In 2013, the NRA's president David Keene recorded an interview with the conservative news site The Daily Caller, during which he compared the weapon used in the Sandy Hook massacre to the musket:
This nation was founded as a result of the fact, people, citizens who had a musket above their fireplace grabbed the gun when an emergency confronted them. For four million Americans, the AR-15 is the musket of today.
And for shooters in Oregon and Sandy Hook it's the weapon of choice to mow down innocent people and children while they're attending school.
Following the Sandy Hook massacre, in which 27 students and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School were killed, the debate about gun control in the United States was renewed. It included proposals for making the background-check system universal, as well as new federal and state legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.
Despite nearly 90 percent of voters supporting background checks and parents from Sandy Hook watching while the Senate considered relatively modest gun-control measures, the GOP blocked all efforts.
So, it makes perfect sense that John Boehner, who recently purportedly quit his job after talking with the pope, would blame Democrats for mass shootings.
According to an article in Huffington Post Boehner puts the onus on the President and his party:
We've seen far too many of these. In '09 and '10, we had Democrat majorities in the House and Senate. We had a Democrat president. And this clearly was not a priority for them. The president can rail all he wants.
Boehner was referring to President Barack Obama's denunciation of Congress' failure to address the issue and, one can only assume, pointing out that the Republicans shouldn't be expected to do much of anything when it comes to the welfare and safety of their constituents -- that's up to the Democrats.
Bobby Jindal, who has also been rumored to be running for president, dug deep into his bag of lunacy and declared that the father of the shooter "owes us an apology." Seriously, he really said that.
In a vacuous and long winded blog post published on his presidential campaign website Tuesday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) claimed the father of Oregon gunman Chris Harper Mercer was a "complete failure."
Jindal wrote:
This killer's father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns. Of course he doesn't know. You know why he doesn't know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son's life. He's a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He's the problem here.
Jindal didn't stop there. Why would he? You don't stick a knife in someone without giving a good twist or two. He continues:
He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn't he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology. When he was asked what his relationship was with his son, he said he hadn't seen him in a while because he lived with his mother. Case Closed.
He then goes on to call out "shallow and simple minded liberals" for blaming "pieces of hardware for the problem."
Right. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Crazy and mentally unstable people. Incidentally, the GOP has actively blocked any legislation that would help find out anything about those crazy people. Congress, and in particular the GOP, has been against such a study since the late 1990s.
Boehner was responding to a question about whether or not Congress should reconsider barring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence as a health issue, as Republicans have repeatedly argued that addressing mental illness is the way to prevent mass shootings.
So, while it would be nice to have some idea about the correlation between mental illness and people suffering from mental illness getting ahold of guns as Boehner says, his party, at times under his leadership, has made it impossible to find that out. They actually passed a law banning health agencies from researching gun violence. In fact, gun violence is so prevalent in America that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy considers it a national health issue. During an interview with NPR in April, Murthy said, "Violence of all kinds is a public health issue. When you have large numbers of people dying from preventable causes, that's a health care issue. That's a public health issue."
And Murthy was such an issue to the NRA and other gun nuts that they spent millions lobbying to block his nomination to the post.
In the meantime, we're left with it being the fault of the democrats, or the Republicans, or the parents, or the teachers, or the mealy-mouthed cowards who didn't have the balls to band together screaming, "He can't get all of us," and rush a crazy guy carrying a small arsenal, and stuff will continue to happen -- as Jeb! and The Donald see it.
We live in a country in which gun deaths are more prevalent amongst preschoolers than they are amongst police. A country in which school children leave for school and parents wonder if they'll see their kids that evening. A country that can't, despite the staggering numbers of people who want to see stricter gun laws, sit down and come up with a reasonable solution to end these indiscriminate and brutal slaughters of people.
Gun proponents argue that laws won't do anything. They argue that it would be a waste of time and taxpayer money and that the end result will not yield any change.
Here's an idea: Let's do it any way and see what happens.
Read more at Now it Counts and Liberals Unite