Mar.29

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Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Nashville Shooting: The Next Day

Who knows why some school shootings get lots of attention and others fade from consciousness fairly quickly. In any case, whatever the reason, there was all kinds of news yesterday related to the mass shooting in Nashville that left three students and three staffers from Covenant Presbyterian Church Elementary School dead. Let's run it down:

• Pending Questions: When we wrote about this news yesterday, our best guess was that the shooter, who had been identified as trans, was MtF. That is because the police were using female pronouns and because the shooter was using a generally female name (Audrey).
  
  Not too many hours after we went live, there was abundant reporting that the shooter was actually FtM and used male pronouns. This now appears to be the consensus view, so we went back and changed yesterday's item. That means that our suggestion that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) misgendered the shooter may have been incorrect. Note that we say may because Greene was working with the same information we were. It is well within the realm of possibility that she intended to misgender the shooter, but that she inadvertently ended up being right.
  
  In any case, there are now other questions about the shooter that remain unanswered. To date, the motive is unclear, beyond the assumption that the shooter must have had some sort of bad experience(s) while attending the school (though a "manifesto" has reportedly been found). Also, there are conflicting reports about the ownership of the guns that were used in the shooting. Many outlets are reporting that the shooter had been diagnosed with an "emotional disorder" and yet was still able to buy at least seven guns, some of which may have been used on Monday. Other outlets agree about the emotional disorder, but say that the guns used were not among the ones in the shooter's personal cache.
  
  
• Greene: Speaking of Greene, she switched into tinfoil hat mode on Twitter, firing off a series of tweets that were a mixture of hateful and crazy. The final one read:

  In the wake of a transgender shooter targeting a Christian school and murdering kids, every American should know the threat of Antifa driven trans-terrorism.
  
  Twitter should not whitewash the incitement of politically motivated violence.

  That was the final tweet in the sequence because that was enough to get Greene's account locked by Twitter. It's not so easy to do that in the Elon Musk era, but somehow the Representative found a way.
  
  
• Red Flag Laws: Speaking of mental diagnoses, it is at least possible that a federal red flag law, which would make it much harder for people with psychological dysfunction to acquire firearms, and which tends to be supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans, would have prevented this particular shooting. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) was interviewed by CNN, and said that he knows for sure that a red flag law wouldn't have helped here. His reasoning is that the deaths on Monday were not caused by the gun, they were caused by poor mental health, and so it's the poor mental health we really have to focus on.
  
  We searched the Library of Congress' database of legislation proposed by members and none of the 110 bills or amendments proposed by Buck would increase funding for mental health care or would otherwise do anything to improve upon this problem. Buck must have been too busy working on the "No Federal Tax Dollars for Illegal Aliens Health Insurance Act of 2022," the "No TikTok on Government Devices Act," the "Stop Greenlighting Driver Licenses for Illegal Immigrants Act" and the "Blue Lives Matter Act of 2016." A member's gotta have his priorities!
  
  
• Andy Ogles: As chance would have it, the school that was the site of the shooting was in the district of Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). That would be the same Andy Ogles who has lied about or exaggerated vast swathes of his résumé. It would also be the same Andy Ogles whose Christmas card was a macabre family photo of his brood gathered around the Christmas tree, each of them holding a high-powered rifle.
  
  As you might imagine, there has been some criticism of Ogles' casual attitude about guns, in view of what happened in his district. And Ogles has responded, saying that while he certainly offers his "thoughts and prayers" to the family of the victims, "Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms?" Undoubtedly, that makes the parents of those children feel much better.
  
  
• Tucker Carlson: As shameless as Greene, Buck and Ogles are, there may be no more shameless person walking the planet right now than Fox entertainer Tucker Carlson. We are generally reluctant to give any attention to his propagandistic bloviating, but sometimes he goes so far over the line that we just can't look away. And so it was yesterday, when he decreed that "The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy." His "argument," if you can even call it that, is that good Christians accept that they were made just the way that God wanted them to be made, whereas trans people think their judgment is superior to that of God. We presume that on today's program, Carlson will make clear that people who have pacemakers, people who had had hip or knee replacements, people who have had heart, liver, or kidney transplants, people who have their cleft palates corrected, people who have Lasix, and people who lift weights are also enemies of Christianity.
  
  Incidentally, the staff theologian tells us that the Bible does have some unpleasant things to say about people who approach the altar of the Lord with a defect in their sight, thought there doesn't seem to be anything about approaching the altar of the Lord with a gender identity other than the one that He chose.

What does this all mean? All we can say is that whenever there is a shooting like this, it's Republicans who end up running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to explain themselves, to create distractions, and to otherwise change the narrative. That suggests to us that they are on the wrong side of the issue when it comes to the moral/human dimension. That said, they do not seem to pay a price for this at the ballot box, while they continue to collect that sweet, sweet NRA money. So, it would seem that they are not on the wrong side of the issue when it comes to cold, hard political reality. (Z)