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canyonwalkerOops, it happened again. Another week, another mass shooting. (Actually these happen more than once a day in the US; it's just they only make the news once a week or so because we're sadly so accustomed to them.) It was another school shooting, too. On Thursday a troubled student at Perry High School north of Des Moines, Iowa, walked in with a gun and killed a sixth grader and injured 7 other people including the principal before turning his gun on himself. Example news coverage: NBC News article & video, 5 Jan 2024.
The shooting occurred while many GOP candidates seeking the 2024 presidential nomination are in Iowa ahead of the state's first-in-nation caucus later this month. Sadly these leaders had nothing meaningful to say about the tragedy. Folks such as Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy offered their "thoughts", as they always do, but when it came to political solutions all they could offer was that we have a "mental health" problem in this country.
The problem with conservatives blaming gun violence on "mental health" is twofold. One, these same conservatives routinely block laws relating to mental health and guns, whether it be (a) funding for mental health care or (b) restrictions on possession of guns by the mentally ill. Two, as many people pointed out when House Speaker Mike Johnson said the problem is "the human heart" after a church shooting a few months ago, humans in every country in the world have hearts but only in the US among first-world countries do we have such an outrageous death toll by gun violence. Since 2020 gun violence has been the leading cause of death among kids in the US. It's not the hearts, it's the guns, stupid.
Donald Trump was even more direct about the GOP's intransigence against doing anything meaningful about gun violence. People "have to get over it," he said at a rally in Iowa Friday. Example news coverage: Rolling Stone, 5 Jan 2024.
The shooting occurred while many GOP candidates seeking the 2024 presidential nomination are in Iowa ahead of the state's first-in-nation caucus later this month. Sadly these leaders had nothing meaningful to say about the tragedy. Folks such as Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy offered their "thoughts", as they always do, but when it came to political solutions all they could offer was that we have a "mental health" problem in this country.
The problem with conservatives blaming gun violence on "mental health" is twofold. One, these same conservatives routinely block laws relating to mental health and guns, whether it be (a) funding for mental health care or (b) restrictions on possession of guns by the mentally ill. Two, as many people pointed out when House Speaker Mike Johnson said the problem is "the human heart" after a church shooting a few months ago, humans in every country in the world have hearts but only in the US among first-world countries do we have such an outrageous death toll by gun violence. Since 2020 gun violence has been the leading cause of death among kids in the US. It's not the hearts, it's the guns, stupid.
Donald Trump was even more direct about the GOP's intransigence against doing anything meaningful about gun violence. People "have to get over it," he said at a rally in Iowa Friday. Example news coverage: Rolling Stone, 5 Jan 2024.
