[This] is happening, over and over, because certain people who very obviously have the power to try to stop it are refusing to do so and letting it happen. That isn’t random…
[This] is tolerated by Republicans and the right wing. This tolerance of such high levels of violence makes it, in essence, sanctioned by the state, or perhaps in this case, the states…
[Republicans] find this level and type of violence acceptable, and choose, over and over, not to do anything about it. And that is the fact that unites these otherwise unrelated acts of violence: The Republican Party makes excuses every time for why this or that act couldn’t have been prevented, and we must therefore do nothing. That makes the Republican Party responsible for this carnage…
… Am I saying that individual Republicans want individual schoolchildren to die? Of course not. I am saying that these same Republicans in general venerate a level of violence in our society that the majority of us find intolerable and appalling, and they understand intuitively how that violence advances their agenda, by giving their rabid base something to rally around. Mass-shooting violence used to be random in this country. But at this point, with it happening so frequently, and with the fanatical veneration of guns and the violence they reap so deeply knitted into the American right’s worldview, this violence ceased to be random some years ago.
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From The New Republic newsletter, ‘Fighting Words,’ by Michael Tomasky. (No link available.)
May 31st, 2022 at 10:57AM
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