God And Guns

The NRA thinks we need more guns in class to prevent massacres like the one that happened Friday. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, thinks the shooting happened because we’ve taken God out of the schools.

Yeah, all we need is more guns and more God. That combination always prevents violence.

I wonder, could the shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, have been prevented if we put God back in the theater? What about the shopping mall shooting?

The worse thing about these statements isn’t that they are crazy or even stupid. It is that they are unserious. The people who make these suggestions know very well they wouldn’t do a thing to prevent massacres, but they make them anyway. In other words, they are perfectly willing to use school shootings as a way to pimp their own political agendas, knowing those agendas wouldn’t stop violence in any significant way. Does this make them cynical and evil bastards? Probably, but it’s more likely that they simply can’t ingest the full reality of the situation. School shootings, like predator drone strikes, waterboarding, or blowing up Afghan wedding parties, are just distant things that happen “out there” to other people. They have no visceral meaning to people who spend their entire lives in a safe, soft, political/media womb where the only genuine reality is fighting to gain temporary partisan advantage. These kinds of events are just tools to be manipulated in the service of politics.  The only thing that matters is winning. They are just as out of touch as the people who commit these acts.