In the immediate aftermath, members of Congress are weighing in on what actions they'll take in the wake of this latest mass shooting—the one targeting members of Congress, that is, not the near-simultaneous San Francisco one that nobody has mentioned or given any thought to. The answer appears to be more guns.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who was present during the morning's shooting, leaped immediately to the notion that if he and his staff were carrying guns themselves, during their morning of baseball practice, the shooter "wouldn't have gotten too far."
"If this had happened in Georgia, he wouldn't have gotten too far. I had a staff member who was in his car maybe 20 yards behind the shooter who was penned in his car, who back in Georgia carries a 9 mm in his car. I carry a weapon. He had a clear shot at him, but here we're not allowed to carry any weapons here."
Q: But you can carry in Virginia.
"Yeah but most of us are here in DC ... how do you have the gun here and just transport it to Virginia?"
Q: Should members be allowed to carry in DC?
"I think we need to look at some kind of reciprocity for members here, but also we need to look at security details," [...]
We’re going to try to give Loudermilk the benefit of the doubt here and hope he will rethink, but it’s bad news if the initial reaction to the Virginia mass shooting becomes, of all things, a push to weaken Washington D.C.'s gun laws or simply nullify them for members of Congress. Loudermilk noted that "we're not any more special than anybody else but we are targets." But he also used the shooting to justify the Republican lack of "Trumpcare" town halls with citizens.
"This is exactly why there's a lot of fear of even doing town halls at this point. Some of the things this guy is posting on Facebook—we get the same things and even worse.
There is a tremendous gap between angry Facebook posts and mass shootings, of course—and one presumes loaded assault rifles are already not allowed at congressional town halls, but that may be giving individual states too much credit.
But the initial reaction to the latest shooting of a member of Congress (prior to this morning, Rep. Gabby Giffords was the last to be wounded by a shooter targeting her) appears to be the notion that members of Congress need to carry more guns. If this "had happened in Georgia" (hint: it happens in Georgia a lot) Rep. Loudermilk believes he or his staff could have taken down the shooter before police did. This does not happen in Georgia either.
Let's hope Loudermilk rethinks his stance. There are some obvious measures we can take to help prevent individuals with violent criminal records from obtaining assault rifles for the purpose of murdering other Americans or engaging in terrorist acts against their government; none of them involve Rep. Loudermilk's unnamed staffer being able to take down an murder-minded gunman only after the first shots have already been fired.