Trump ally: Schools should protect themselves like 'pawn shops and biker bars'
The latest absolutely absurd idea from gun safety opponents.
Survivors of last week’s mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, are leading a massive public outcry for action, and Republican shills are getting desperate in response.
The panic from the right about a groundswell against gun violence began even while the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School unfolded, as Trump and his team went into hiding, and elected Republicans refused to stray from Fox News to face questions about the massacre.
Trump has since lashed out at the students themselves, and Republicans have loudly signaled resistance to doing anything about the epidemic.
But on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning, CNN contributor and former Republican Lt. Gov. of South Carolina André Bauer chimed in with an absurd suggestion that would almost certainly be much worse than doing nothing.
“People who want to do bad things, are going to find a way to do it,” Bauer said, echoing a particularly nonsensical, all too common right-wing talking point that seems to argue against the premise of making any laws at all.
“So we should do nothing?” former Michigan Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm interrupted.
“I’m not saying that, but I’m saying we also have a cultural problem,” Bauer responded.
“Pawn shops don’t get robbed, biker bars don’t get robbed,” he continued. “You know why? Because they know that those are places where there are people are gonna provide a lot of resistance, and so what we need to do in schools is have people that have firearms.”
Bauer’s suggestion is ludicrous on its face, given that unlike pawn shops and biker bars, schools are populated by children and educators who should have no reason to fear armed conflict. The addition of more firearms in untrained hands would surely only make their situation more dangerous, not less.
But even Bauer’s premise is false: Pawn shops get robbed all the time, and a biker bar was the scene of a 2015 shootout that claimed nine lives.
Republican desperation only figures to get worse, as the passionate and eloquent young survivors of this tragedy continue to shine a brilliant light on the inaction that has led the nation to this breaking point.
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