Why mass shootings happen in America on a routine basis, making us an outlier among not just peer nations but virtually every nation, is unknowable.
As Republicans helpfully point out in the wake of the mass murders of children, grocery shoppers, church goers, music lovers and the like, each shooting is unfathomably different from the one that came months, weeks, days before.
Such an inscrutable problem, one with no identifiable common denominator to help elucidate, demands creative solutions.
Luckily, Republicans have dispatched their best and brightest to think outside the box, to offer comprehensive solutions commensurate with the crisis of 214 mass shootings in just the first five months of 2022.
Ted Cruz (with hype man Kevin McCarthy): ‘Not having unlocked back doors’
“The killer entered here the same way that the killer entered in Santa Fe — through a back door, an unlocked back door,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) angrily gesticulated to reporters just outside Robb Elementary School. “I sat down at roundtables with the families from Santa Fe, we talked about what we need to do to harden schools including not having unlocked back doors, including not having unlocked doors to classrooms, having one door that goes in and out of the school, having armed police officers at that one door.”
What a comfort having such a crack tactitian must have been to the loved ones of the ten people murdered and thirteen wounded at Sante Fe high school in 2018.
His idea caught the attention of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
“If this school was on lockdown, could have the doors have been locked where he couldn’t have gotten in?” McCarthy asked Friday on Fox Business. He added that there are “billions of dollars” for schools from COVID-19 relief funds that could be repurposed to reduce school entrances.
Herschel Walker: ‘Getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media’
Republican challenger to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) Herschel Walker came up with a solution so erudite that it escapes the understanding of more pedestrian minds.
“You know, Cain killed Abel and that’s a problem that we have,” he opened promisingly.
“What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things — you know they talk about doing a disinformation — what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media?” he offered.
“This has been happening for years and the way we stop it is putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights,” he added.
Is someone writing this down?!
Paul Gosar: Confirming your priors about ‘a transsexual leftist illegal alien’
Social media users and trolls on 4chan, Twitter and Facebook wasted little time after the shooting in disseminating pictures of at least three trans women and falsely accusing each of them of being the shooter.
The completely fabricated claims were further spread by truth crusaders Alex Jones and Candace Owens.
Before long, the troll-to-congressional kook pipeline did its work.
“It’s a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvadore Ramos,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) wrote in a now-deleted tweet responding to another deleted tweet. “It’s apparently your kind of trash.”
Gosar almost got the shooter’s name correct, a rare and likely fleeting moment of near-accuracy.
Republicans, assorted: Arm the teachers
Republicans, casting around for where more guns could be added into the equation, quickly settled upon teachers.
“You’re going to have to do more at the school,” Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), currently running for reelection, said on Newsmax. “You’re going to have to have more people trained to react.”
“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” he said later on Fox News, adding: “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) told the Associated Press that measures like arming teachers “should be on the table.”
“It’s not just teachers. It’s making sure that people who are inside of school have the ability to defend themselves,” Vos said. “But the idea that we are going to take a heinous act like this and find some kind of logical way to prevent it 100 percent of the time, I just don’t see that occurring.”
Republicans, assorted, and their friends at Fox: More armed guards
Republicans are perennial optimists. They’re particularly skilled at blocking out negativity, like the harpies who point out that flooding schools with guns tends not to dissuade mass shooters. But hey — maybe this time!
“We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Cruz told MSNBC. “Inevitably, when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it.”
“We have to harden these targets so that no one can get in ever except through one entrance,” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R) told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Maybe that would help. Maybe that would stop someone.”
“I think maybe a common sense idea would be take some of that money, a couple billion would do it, and harden some of these soft targets, especially the elementary schools,” chimed in Fox News host Jesse Watters on unspent COVID-19 relief money, adding: “I think it would make a lot of sense to make sure that we have armed security agents there, at least one, for every elementary school in the entire country.”
“I have been advocating for years: people, retired military, retired law enforcement outside the perimeter of every school in the country,” added Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They can donate their time. We can offer them tax breaks, no income tax in the state, no income tax federally, 10 hours a week and we can have every school in America covered.”
