The country is back in the stupid loop about guns and violence, especially in the Gret Stet of Louisiana. This month, there have been mass shootings in Shreveport and Baton Rouge. The former is Speaker Mike Johnson’s hometown; Red Stick is where I finished college and became a naturalized Louisianan.
The regional discussion has focused on mental health, not the easy availability of guns. All the GOP members of the Louisiana Congressional delegation are willing to do is to pray publicly and engage in performative law and order dick waving. As always, they’re disinterested in root causes, which in the case of the Shreveport shooting included poverty and in Baton Rouge, alleged gang banging. Republicans continue to be part of the problem, not the solution, by offering thoughts and prayers, which are useless, annoying, and cliched.
The Louisiana reaction to the Shreveport and Baton Rouge shootings is less annoying than the national GOP reaction to the White House Correspondents dinner attack, about which both Jamie O and I posted yesterday. They argue that Trump’s fakakta ballroom would have stopped the attack. This cretinous claim has already become one of the stupidest things said by Team MAGA. The MAGA idiocy, it burns.
As long as guns are fetishized as religious objects by right-wingers, what Trump called in his first inaugural address, American carnage will continue. This gun nuttery predated the MAGA movement and will still be with us after MAGA collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and incoherence.
Trump’s fetishizing of violence has given the green light to right-wing extremists, which in turn inspired a backlash among some on the left. Political violence should ALWAYS be out of fashion but it’s the worst it’s been since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We got through that epoch and we’ll get through this one. The stupid loop needs to stop but it keeps spinning.
Repeat after me: It’s the guns, stupid.
After writing my Devil Songs Dozen, I took a deep dive into Steve Earle’s lyrics for The Devil’s Right Hand, which include this refrain, “Mama said the pistol is the devil’s right hand.”
Never argue with mama.
The last word goes to Steve Earle followed by The Highwaymen.