Somebody just made a frothy boom-boom.
On CNN's "State of the Union" yesterday, former Pennsylvania senator and for unknown reasons current interviewee Rick Santorum placed America's gun-death epidemic squarely where it belongs: on those damn single moms. Said Santorum, "These kids come from broken homes without dads." It's just so obvious that Santorum is amazed no one's picking up on it:
That is not something we’re talking about and that is the commonality [...] We want to talk about things we can work together on? How about working together to try to see what we can do to get more dads involved in the lives of the kids.
Guns don't kill people, broken homes kill people. Spoilsport Jake Tapper had to go and point out that the Parkland, Florida, mass shooter's parents didn't divorce; Nikolas Cruz's father actually died of a heart attack when Cruz was young. Still, if you think about it, that was pretty irresponsible of him; if he'd known how the boy would turn out, he might have taken better care of himself.
Santorum returned to CNN this morning to explain himself to Chris Cuomo on "New Day," because it's not like he has anything else keeping him busy these days.
Rick Santorum on Gun Control https: //t.co/wL12LYOjY2
— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) February 26, 2018
Cuomo said maybe the debate over gun violence should involve "who gets access to weapons and how," but Santorum wasn't about to be distracted by that nonsense about the killing machines themselves, because it makes far more sense to completely change societal trends instead:
I actually think that if you look at the root cause of these problems, I think the root cause of these problems really end up to a lot of societal factors. You have violence in video games, you have violence on television, you have all sorts of issues related to that kind of culture. Secondly, you have issues in the home. 70 to 75 percent of school shooters, all young males, did not have a father growing up in the home, for a variety of different reasons.
See how he learned from that appearance yesterday to acknowledge that all reasons for fatherlessness are bad? Santorum went on to explain that America is experiencing an "epidemic of young men being raised without dads in the home, and the consequence is not just in gun violence, but a whole host of other maladies."
Oh, but that tricksy Chris Cuomo had to go and point out that other countries have "societal factors" and mental health stuff, too but only America has these insane levels of gun violence and these insane numbers of guns. Which seems kind of unfair, since it fails to account for American Exceptionalism and God's special love for America. So of course, Santorum said we really should be debating mental health, since that is not guns either.
Say, you know what? This all sounds remarkably similar to that time when then-Rep (now Senator) James Lankford of Oklahoma explained way back in 2013 that single moms were probably at fault for all the school shootings, except that in addition to blaming the violent video games and the violent movies for Sandy Hook, he took his single-mom blaming a step further: He said probably welfare fraud moms were frauding the disability system by putting their kids on psychotropic drugs to get more welfare, fraudulently, and that's where the school shooters are coming from. That, at least, is one box Santorum failed to check off here. Other wingnuts are already on that, we're sure.
Then Santorum explained that we need to end "gun free zones" so everyone who needs to get into a firefight can do so with their guns. He even said that theaters ought to welcome people carrying concealed weapons, because what could possibly go wrong when a would-be good guy with a gun decides he's feeling threatened in the dark, apart from maybe a few more shootings of people texting during the previews?
In any case, all Santorum wants is for us to keep in mind that while maybe guns could be part of the problem, fixing the American Family will really make everything better, so why aren't we even talking about that, huh? Apart from every time Rick Santorum is on CNN.
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Or you get a birth control device! And you get a birth control device! Everybody gets a birth control device! For free.
I agree with you completely. Not all women want to breastfeed. That would have been my choice. *I* think it's gross. But yeah, from what I understand, the minute you give birth, the lactivists are on you.