Six people are dead—three 9-year-old children and three adults—in the Nashville school shooting, and Republicans are hard at work selling their message that nothing needs to happen in response. Even when Republicans aren’t trying to blame trans people rather than guns for a type of crime committed at least 95% of the time by cisgender men and 100% of the time with guns, their message is consistent: There’s no problem here that anyone should think about trying to solve.
As Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said, “We're not gonna fix it.” He suggested that the problem cannot be fixed, but at base he meant, “We’re not gonna try.” Burchett illustrated his view that mass shootings cannot be stopped with his daddy’s World War II story: “’Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, then there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’” And apparently, we can’t expect anything different for third-graders than for soldiers in war.
Burchett had his own specific angle, but “We’re not gonna fix it”? That’s Republican doctrine.
RELATED STORY: 'We're not gonna fix it': Tennessee Republican says nothing can be done to stop gun violence
Then there’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, responding to the body camera footage of the police officers who shot and killed the shooter:
Those officers were brave, and while it is their job for which they signed up, they offered a particularly striking contrast to the cowardice of the Uvalde police. But in the minutes it took them to get there, six people were murdered. Good guys with guns works—if your definition of “works” is that six people are dead rather than 21. Additionally, the reality is that very often, police bullets hit bystanders rather than their intended target. This time, they hit their target, who in any case appeared to be alone in the room. But that’s not any kind of foregone conclusion.
The second-ranking Senate Republican also weighed in:
Premature? The survivors of Columbine have children old enough to have been doing lockdown drills for years now. The first-graders killed at Sandy Hook should be in high school today, hoping to make varsity and thinking about where to go to college.
In other nations, once was enough. In the U.S., one of the top-ranking senators is essentially saying that the idea of protecting kids from mass murder in their classrooms, from assault weapons that shred their bodies, will always be premature. That there will always be more dead children to mourn and more Republican excuses for why not just gun ownership but virtually unrestricted ownership of assault weapons is more important than their lives. It feels like there can be nothing new to say about this because we have seen it so many times now, but it is a fresh, piercing grief every time, a grief not just for the lives lost but for those we know will be lost, those living in fear, and the sheer despair of living in a country where our leaders—or enough of them, anyway—won’t do a thing to change it.
The Republican Party’s leadership and its presidential candidates have leaned further and further into doom-and-gloom “woke apocalypse” rhetoric. Kerry and Markos analyze what has so far been a losing strategy to make Americans feel frightened of demanding actual policy ideas from Republicans.
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