‘This isn’t a guns situation,’ announced President Donald Trump today, hours after the worst mass shooting in Texas history, and the fourth worst in America’s history.
Sorry, WHAT?
Not a guns situation?
A man shot 46 people in a church, killing at least 26 of them.
He used a rapid-fire AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, the US mass shooter’s preferred weapon of choice, and obliterated men, women and children with dozens of bullets during a rampage lasting several minutes.
That, Mr Trump, is very definitely a ‘guns situation’.
Speaking from Japan, President Donald Trump announced, ‘this isn’t a guns situation,’ hours after the worst mass shooting in Texas history
The President had other things to say.
First, he expressed shock.
‘Who would ever think a thing like this could happen?’ he sighed, shaking his head in disbelief.
Gosh yes, which of us could have possibly predicted a mass shooting in America, where there have been 307 mass shootings so far this year?
Who could have imagined a lone deranged white man might shoot so many of his fellow countrymen just five weeks after another lone deranged white man shot hundreds of his fellow countrymen in Las Vegas?
Especially when not a single thing had been done after Vegas to stop it recurring?
Trump was very keen we don’t discuss gun control when pressed on it today by the White House press corps during his tour to Japan.
‘It’s a little too soon,’ he explained.
He said the same after Vegas, so I’m now confused; is it still too soon to discuss gun control in the wake of THAT outrage, given it’s only been 35 days?
Who could have imagined a lone deranged white man – who recently shared this photo of his rifle – might shoot so many of his fellow countrymen?
Devin Kelly, left, shot up the Texas church just five weeks after Stephen Paddock, right, committed the deadliest mass shooting in American history. When is it not ‘too soon’ to discuss gun control after mass shootings in America given there is more than one a day?
When, exactly, is it not ‘too soon’ to discuss gun control after mass shootings in America given there is more than one a day?
Trump thinks he knows what the real problem is, though.
‘We have a lot of mental health problems in our country,’ he said. ‘This is a mental health problem at the highest level.’
Ah OK, got it.
So if these mass shootings are about mental health and not guns, then presumably President Trump has been pushing hard to stop mentally ill people from buying guns?
Wrong.
In fact, he’s been doing the exact opposite.
One of Trump’s first executive orders as President was to lift the ban on selling guns to mental health patients put in place by his predecessor Barack Obama following the Sandy Hook atrocity.
That ban directly stopped an estimated 75,000 people with mental disorders from legally buying guns.
They are now all free to do so, thanks to Donald Trump.
He did, however, see one positive from yesterday’s church massacre.
‘Fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the other direction,’ said Trump, ‘otherwise it would have been much worse.’
Much worse? The shooter had already shot pretty much everyone in the church and had walked back outside when he was finally confronted.
His dirty, snivelling, cowardly work was done. It was too late to stop him.
Trump’s message was clear though: the only answer to this kind of mass shooting is more, not fewer guns.
It’s a view shared by many other Republicans.
Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, told Fox News hours after the shooting that American churches should now be “arming some of the parishioners”.
The state’s Governor, Greg Abbott would certainly welcome such a move.
Two years ago he tweeted: ‘I’m EMBARRASSED: TEXAS #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans @NRA.’
The Texas governor tweeted the above two years ago
Perhaps the shooter Devin Patrick Kelley read that galvanizing tweet before splashing out on his AR-15, who knows?
I can confidently predict two things following this latest massacre.
One, there will be no new guns laws.
Two, gun sales in Texas will rise significantly in the next few months as people rush to arm themselves as ‘defense’ against future attacks.
After all, that’s what their president has effectively just told them to do.
Trump used to be reasonably sensible about guns, for a Republican.
In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, he wrote: ‘I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.’
In the same book he attacked Republicans who “walk the NRA line” and “refuse even limited restrictions” on gun laws.
Now look at him.
When he ran for President, Trump became one of those same Republicans walking the NRA line and refusing even limited restrictions on gun laws.
Why? Because the NRA bankrolled him to the tune of $30 million and instructed their five million members to vote for him.
It is no exaggeration to say the NRA helped win the election for Trump.
So now he’s wedged in their heat-packing pockets and he can’t get out without a high risk of losing their support at the next election.
It’s reduced him to a pathetically weak stooge of America’s most dangerous and invidious lobby group.
‘The eight year assault on your 2nd Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end,’ Trump told the NRA members after he won. ‘I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Never ever.’
Oh how they whooped with joy that day.
Yesterday, many of the parishioners in First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs were whooping with similar joy at their weekly Sunday service when the gunman burst in.
Minutes later, they were lying in a hideous pool of bullet-ridden bodies and blood.
When the news broke, President Trump said: ‘My thoughts and prayers are with the families in today’s horrible attack. All Americans pray to God to help the wounded the families of the victims.’
Later, he tweeted: ‘May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs.’
Oh the irony.
The poor people who got shot were in a church praying to God at the very moment they were killed and wounded.
President Trump tweeted: ‘My thoughts and prayers are with the families in today’s horrible attack. All Americans pray to God to help the wounded the families of the victims.’ Later, he tweeted the above, ‘May God be w/ the people of Sutherland Springs’
The poor people who got shot were in a church praying to God at the very moment they were killed and wounded.
Prayers didn’t save them yesterday, and no prayers today will save thousands more innocent people being shot dead in a country now shamed on an hourly basis by horrendous gun violence.
I’ve expended considerable energy in the past few years trying to argue for practical measures to reduce the level of gun deaths in America; a new assault weapons ban, a restriction on the size of gun bullet magazines, and universal background checks on all gun sales.
All three of these things might have helped stop yesterday’s attack, or curbed the scale of it.
But America prefers ‘thoughts and prayers’ to new gun laws.
So today, I offer a simple prayer of my own:
Dear America,
I pray that you get off your weeping knees and take immediate action before yet more of you and your children get blown to smithereens.
I pray that you stop pretending the answer to gun violence is yet more guns when the whole world knows this is utterly insane.
I pray that your supine President finds the balls to stand up to the NRA and put the lives of his fellow Americans before the cash registers of Smith & Wesson. After all, when an Islamist terrorist ran over a bunch of cyclists in New York last week, he instantly demanded new laws to stop them doing it again. If this Texas shooter had been a Muslim, Trump would be doing the same now.
I pray for common sense, not blind partisan intransigence, to finally prevail. When Britain banned most guns after the 1996 Dunblane massacre, and when Australia did the same after the Hobart massacre the same year, politicians on all sides came together for the greater good of their country.
For God’s sake, America, wake the f**k up to the ghastly, deadly, unending, worsening reality of your sickening gun-crazed society and DO SOMETHING.