Only A Sick Culture Worships Guns

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles should regret this photo, but he won't.

Whenever there's a regularly scheduled mass shooting, Republicans are desperate to blame something, anything, other than the guns that murdered all the people. Monday's massacre at The Covenant School in Nashville gave them a new target, and we'll unfortunately cover their transphobic garbage as it develops. However, let's never stop talking about the American Right's sick gun culture. These aren't people who just own guns for self-defense and other assorted Clint Eastwood purposes. They romanticize guns all out of proportion, like Woody Allen's black-and-white and exclusively all-white Manhattan.

 Here's Rep. Andy Ogles, the gun fetishist who represents Tennessee's grotesquely gerrymandered fifth congressional district, which technically includes Nashville. Republicans took a dull knife to the liberal city, effectively neutralizing its political power and robbing its residents, who make most of the money that pays for the state's existence, of true representation. Instead, the good people of Nashville are represented by this fool.

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 Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts shared Ogle's Christmas card from 2021, which features his family posing in front of a Christmas tree while armed with assault rifles, the ultimate stocking stuffer. I'm not a gun expert, but it looks like Ogle is holding his weapon upside down. Regardless, it's uncomfortably close to his youngest child, who at least isn't packing heat himself.

On "Star Trek," the fierce but honorable Klingons worship a warrior god. That's at least internally consistent. The Ogles are commemorating the birth of their savior, the "prince of peace," with an aggressive display of firepower. Christians should rightly consider Ogle's card blasphemous, but maybe Christian conservatives don't worship Jesus so much as the AR-15.

 Professional terrible person Laura Ingraham claimed last night that liberals "believe citizens should have unlimited access to porn, weed, and abortion frankly even after birth." Ingraham is a real kill joy about porn and the demon reefer, but most people who enjoy both don't make them the focal point of their Christmas cards. That's just weird.

There is also no such thing as abortion "after birth," unless you count the school shootings that Republicans are doing shit-all to stop. They can only suggest after-the-fact "solutions" that won't actually save any lives.

Not long after news about the Nashville shooting broke, Sen. Rick Scott from Florida tweeted, "We need to consider an automatic death penalty for school shooters. Life in prison is not enough for the deranged monsters who go into our schools to kill innocent kids & educators. Pray for all facing the unimaginable in Nashville. This is horrible & must stop.

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As Richard Pryor would say, "dig how ignorant" Rick Scott is. He's literally responding to an article telling us that the police killed the shooter. According to a statistical analysis from Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama who studies mass shootings rather than spitballing radical policy positions on Twitter, few mass shooters escape the scene of their crimes. He writes, "Mass shooters died in 48 percent of the attacks studied, 38 percent by their own hand and the remaining by 'suicide by cop' – using weapons to intentionally provoke police, who are trained to shoot and kill in life-threatening situations."

State-sanctioned vengeance might feel good but it's also not very good at preventing mass shootings. Very few school shooters conduct a cost-benefit analysis before deciding to murder a lot of people, very quickly. Does Scott imagine a seriously disturbed individual would ever think, "Oh gosh, I might receive an automatic death penalty for my horrible crime! Guess I'll just write a nasty letter to my potential victims instead."

The problem isn't that we as a nation aren't violent enough . The problem is that we worship tools of violence. That is what distinguishes America from every other developed nation that has video games, porn, legalized abortion, and people who suffer from mental illness. Here, after the latest mass shooting, Americans hold their loved ones even tighter, but unfortunately they are too often an AR-15.

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