The Proper Will Blame College Shootings on Actually Something Different Than Weapons

The one hope to be discovered following tragedies just like the Nashville capturing Monday is that this time can be completely different. That our leaders will meet the second. That Republicans, who’ve lengthy put the gun foyer over the lives of their constituents, will lastly “present some braveness,” as White Home Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre demanded of them Tuesday. However sadly, the aftermath of the Nashville faculty capturing—which left three kids and three adults lifeless—appears to be taking part in out like numerous others earlier than it: with a whole lot of “ideas and prayers” from Republicans too cowardly or careless to do something aside from resorting to tortured blame-shifting.

The GOP over time has pinned mass shootings on every thing from psychological well being to inadequate safety to a lack of weapons. However after the Covenant College shooter was recognized Monday as 28-year-old former pupil Audrey Hale—who legislation enforcement officers described as transgender—some on the best instantly folded the tragedy into their current anti-LGBTQ tradition battle. A lot of the anti-trans scapegoating got here from figures within the conservative media, together with Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk. 

However the harmful, ugly rhetoric has additionally been parroted by some GOP officers. “If early studies are correct {that a} trans shooter focused a Christian faculty, there must be a whole lot of soul looking on the intense left,” tweeted Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. “How a lot hormones like testosterone and medicines for psychological sickness was the transgender Nashville faculty shooter taking?” asked Consultant Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fringe extremist elevated to the mainstream by Home Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Everybody can cease blaming weapons now.”

The concept “everybody can cease blaming weapons” as a result of the Nashville shooter was recognized as trans is, in fact, as absurd as it’s grotesque. It wasn’t the shooter’s gender id that killed three nine-year-olds and three faculty staffers; it was the handgun and two assault weapons Hale used. These weapons, at the least two of which had been apparently obtained legally, are the fixed on this distinctly American disaster. America grants troubled individuals unprecedented entry to lethal weapons. And it’s not simply the mass shootings that set America aside from different nations; it’s the each day drumbeat of gun violence, suicides, and accidents. 

After final yr’s Uvalde faculty capturing—which some Republicans blamed on insufficiently safe doorways—Democrats received some bipartisan help for a gun security invoice, essentially the most substantial to be enacted in a long time. “Lives can be saved,” President Joe Biden stated on the time. However the limitations of the laws he signed had been laid naked simply two months later, when a gunman opened fireplace on an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago, killing seven and wounding dozens of others. In a darkish coincidence, a survivor of that Highland Park capturing— Ashbey Beasley, who was on the best way again from lobbying lawmakers in Washington for an assault weapons—occurred to be in Nashville Monday when the Covenant capturing unfolded. Beasley was stopping in Nashville to fulfill with Shaundelle Brooks, the mom of a 2018 mass capturing sufferer, when Brooks referred to as to let her know that her different son’s faculty was on lockdown. “Aren’t you guys bored with overlaying this?” an exasperated Beasley requested the press on the scene, because the too-familiar cycle lurched into gear but once more. 

“I’ve been lobbying in D.C. since we survived a mass capturing in July,” Beasley stated. “How is that this nonetheless taking place? How are our kids nonetheless dying, and why are we failing them?”