School Shootings

[Rev. Rye]

Sometime last November, after the Texas First Baptist shooting, I posted this:

Let's face it; the way I see it, the Republicans have something of a vested interest in keeping mass shootings going. If we have people killing each other with assault rifles, it's a sign of moral decay within America. And, naturally, since the Republicans are all about crowing about moral decay, they can claim they have the cure: the agenda they've already been pushing. And, of course, since restricting sales on guns would likely have an effect on the number of civilian gun massacres America sees every year, it's in their best interest to keep the train rolling, and if they can keep things going by shifting the conversation elsewhere and blame anyone but themselves, it makes it all the better for them. Or it could just be that several jackasstic lines of thinking within conservative thought (such as it is) are converging to create a situation where they just keep happening, the people in power do to something refuse to do anything, and they can just pat themselves on the back for it.

I don't think they're actively orchestrating (or worse, fabricating, because that current trend in conspiracy theorism is fucking stupid, especially when you consider that it's arisen at a time where it's virtually impossible to fake something on this order without being swiftly exposed) these mass shootings, but, seriously, if the Republican Party really did have a vested interest in exploiting massive tragedies like this, that they use them just so they can further their own agendas and sell that as a way out of this, would they be behaving any differently than they are now?

The sad thing is that, at this point, the biggest problem with this line of reasoning is that the Republicans even have an agenda beyond turning America into a Social Darwinist hellhole. Maybe Pre-Trump, it'd be to create a theocracy that's equal parts Gilead and Galt's Gulch, but at this point, they don't seem to even have an endgame.