Republican Congressman Blames Mass Shootings on Women Having Rights

In a sane country that actually valued human lives, last week’s mass shooting in Texas—or, the one before that in Buffalo, or thousands before that in the years prior—would have marked the moment the elected officials who’ve refused to pass gun control legislation looked in the mirror and decided to stop being part of the problem.

Unfortunately, the U.S. is not a sane country, and instead of actually doing something to prevent these atrocities from occurring all the time—in case you missed it, there have been 17 mass shootings since Uvalde, Texas—Republicans have launched a competition in which they duke it out to see who can come up with the most ridiculous thing to blame mass shootings on besides guns. So far, that’s included too many doors; not enough God; pot; single moms; unarmed teachers; and schools being designed without “trip wires” and “man traps.”

Obviously, the competition is fierce. But that didn’t scare Missouri representative and Senate candidate Billy Long, who rolled up to Wednesday’s interview with a local radio station with—and excuse the phrase though we assume he’ll appreciate it—the big guns. Asked by host Branden Rathert if “Is there any appetite in D.C. amongst Republicans to look at doing some things differently as it relates to guns,” Long responded that “No one has been able to come up with any kind of suggestion that would have helped in any of these situations”— fact-check: false!— and that passing gun control measures is not the solution to the epidemic of gun violence. “Unfortunately, they’re trying to blame inanimate objects for all of these tragedies,” he said. Then he added: “When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year. Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri, so something has happened to our society and I go back to abortion. When we decided it was okay to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

As Jezebel’s Laura Bassett noted, that‘s a pretty rich explanation given that you don’t typically hear about mass shootings being carried out by women who’ve undergone abortions, probably because mass shootings are almost exclusively the domain of men, a not insignificant number of which are violent misogynists (and racists and antisemites, etc). The U.K. legalized abortion five years before the U.S., yet strangely, it doesn’t seem to have the same problem with mass shootings. If Long and his ilk were actually serious about preventing thousands of Americans being killed by guns every year, they might wonder why. Hint: It doesn’t have to do with clotted cream or corgis. (Just so it’s clear: The actual reason that more mass shootings occur in the U.S. than any other wealthy country the answer—the only answer—is the “astronomical number of guns” in this country.)

Elsewhere in conservative bullshit re: guns, on Wednesday, Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania GOP nominee for governor, shared and doubled down on a 2018 video of him likening gun control to the policies of Adolf Hitler. “It’s appalling to me any time there’s a shooting, the left will jump on that as a way to advance an agenda to remove our right to bear arms,” Mastriano says in the clip. “We saw Lenin do the same thing in Russia. We saw Hitler do the same thing in Germany in the ’30s. Where does it stop? Where do the tyrants stop infringing upon our rights?”

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Paul Ryan: A lot of Republicans wanted to impeach Trump but were too chicken

The former House speaker knows a little something about not having a backbone when it comes to the ex-president. Per Insider:

Paul Ryan said on Wednesday that more House Republicans would’ve voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after the January 6 Capitol riot if they'd had the “guts” to do so. Ryan made the remarks at a small reception at a hotel in Florence, South Carolina, while campaigning for Republican Rep. Tom Rice, one of 10 House Republicans [who] voted to impeach Trump. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who served as speaker of the House from 2015 until his retirement in 2019, also criticized Trump and other conservatives for seeking to exact “vengeance” on Republicans who cross the former president.

“This is just such a crystal clear case where you have a hard working, effective, senior member of Congress who deserves reelection vs. people who are just trying to be celebrities who may be trying to help Trump with his vengeance,” Ryan said, according to the Myrtle Beach Sun News. “That’s not who voters want, voters want people focused on their solutions not on Trump’s vengeance and that to me is a really clear cut case here.” While all valid points, it would have been nice to hear this kind of talk about Trump when Ryan actually had, y’know, any kind of power.

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