By Bill Mefford
On Sunday, in White Settlement, Texas, one person is dead and one person is in critical condition because they were shot while in church. Though donald trump loves to say he has done more for religion – especially evangelical Christianity – than anyone, apparently, that does not include keeping people safe when they worship Jesus. The bottom line that needs to be repeated again and again - the narrative as they say, is that Republican politicians do not care about public safety. If they did care they would do something about it. They have done absolutely nothing except make guns more accessible.
Thus, the freedom to commit massacres continues unabated by federal legislation. Mitch McConnell and donald trump are two of the most powerful men in the world and they have at their fingertips House-passed legislation that, although would not eliminate mass gun shootings, would indeed curtail mass shootings. And they refuse to lift a finger to make it happen. They will not do a damn thing about it now or ever. And it is because they do not care about peoples’ lives. Their evangelical “Christian” followers do not care about peoples’ lives either otherwise they would throw the enormous political weight of their movement behind the House-passed legislation and demand that they address gun violence. But evangelical leaders have not done that and it is clear that it is solely because they do not care.
And so gun violence will not stop.
We all know what will happen next. Thoughts and prayers will freely flow. CNN will have media on site for a day or two. We will hear from someone related to one of the victims in a fit of sanity and rage cry out for someone to do someone to stop this carnage. Hashtags will follow. Then, after a day or so, the NRA will come out and demonize people with mental illness and they will reiterate the absolutely baseless and inane talking point that a “good guy with a gun always stops a bad guy with a gun,” pointing to the fact that someone inside the church shot the shooter while ignoring the fact that someone was still killed and someone was still critically injured. They will make their baseless and inane point because they do not care about the dead person or the critically injured person. They care only for the profits they will make.
It does not matter that the NRA is utterly devoid of truth or an ounce of compassion for people whose lives have been lost to gun violence or whose lives have been shattered because their loved ones were lost to gun violence. So, the next thing that happens is the NRA-owned cowards holding political office – people like McConnell, trump, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator John Cornyn, and Governor Greg Abbott – will trot out on cue with freshly written talking points by the political point man - the bag man - for the NRA, Chris Cox. They will also focus on mental illness even while they deny people access to universal health care and ignore the fact that a fraction of people with mental illness commit any violence.
The open secret that we all know but that the media refuses to say out loud is that none of these politicians really care about the people they claim to serve. The media invites these cowards onto their shows while they lie and spout NRA-sanctioned misinformation and by doing so they become accessories to the murders after the fact.
Bottom line is that Republican politicians and a few Democratic politicians do not care about law enforcement whose lives are exposed to violence literally every day because of limitless access to guns. They do not care about mental illness because if they did they would ensure that more people have affordable health care to be able to have access to mental health treatment, and they especially love to scapegoat people with mental illness. They do not care about teachers or preachers or Rabbis or students or workers or any number of other groups who congregate in public spaces and who have been massacred by people who have easy access to weapons of mass death. They do not care and it will not stop.
If they did care about these people – or any people, they would do something about it. But they don’t, so it will not stop.