Former Minnesota Governor and former Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty tonight was on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. The discussion turned to gun control, and Governor Pawlenty gave a perfect performance: a perfect recitation of things that won’t work in all cases, a perfect obfuscation of the fact that all he really said is that nothing works in all cases, and a perfect example, an all too over-the-top example, of how Republicans work this issue. It was so perfect that it made his real intent perfectly obvious.
Every time any solution is offered to the insane level of gun violence in our otherwise advanced country, they’re ready. They pounce with their list of what that won’t solve, which shooting this wouldn’t have prevented, why these won’t work in this other case, and how just terribly complicated it all is. Pawlenty gave a text-book performance of it last night, enumerating the situations that one solution or another would not solve. Sadly, no one on the show challenged him to find a solution instead. Help find a solution, admit that you can’t because you have no useful ideas, or admit that you don’t want a solution and this is all just a stalling technique.
Every time one NRA stooge or another starts telling us how none of our solutions to gun violence will work all of the time (as both Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are prone to do), challenge them. It is just too easy a claim. Challenge them. Help find a solution, then. Put up or shut up. And when they come back with the expected “there is no solution that preserves both our rights and your lives,” point out that there are only two reason to give up so easily and to treat all the deaths from gun violence so cavalierly.
It’s either is an admission of their limitations, or it is a red flag to everyone that their best and maybe only defense is to run out the clock, keep denying that anything will work until time, again, steps in and anesthetizes our sensibilities. The NRA is so arrogant that it won’t really care if you show that its proxies have no clothes. They figure they have enough single-issue voters to scare any politician. But the poles say we have the numbers. Challenge their stooges enough, and enough voters might just catch on.