The consensus prize for wrongheaded response in the wake of the killings at the Covenant School goes to Rep. Tim Burchett, but he wasn’t the only contender.
Burchett earned his dishonor with his much-noted comments about the likelihood of Congress addressing gun violence. He acknowledged “it’s a horrible, horrible situation,” but then went on: “And, we’re not going to fix it.”
“Criminals,” he added, “are going to be criminals.”
Kind of makes you wonder why Burchett, who’s been a public official in one office or another since 1995, even bothers. Paycheck aside.
In the early hours and days after the shootings, I made the mistake of trying to gather as much information about them as I could. This led me first to local television, where reporters and anchors faced the impossible task of speaking coherently about a situation that was by its nature incoherent. Facts were initially in short supply; we had the what, where and when, but not the who, how or why.
Misinformation arrived to fill in the blanks. The shooter was possibly a female teenager, we were told at first, a statistical anomaly. Shootings with multiple deaths almost never involve female killers. Later it was reported that the killer was instead a 28-year-old “trans woman,” and oh, the internet trolls could not contain themselves. Nor did they try.
What is it about Twitter that brings out the worst in people? Or, perhaps, the worst people?
A semantic note here: According to the tangled terminology of today’s gender-fluid world, the killer was actually a “trans man”: someone born female who came to identify as a male. The inaccurate description “trans woman” – someone born male who later identifies as female – had some online provocateurs gleefully speculating about the potential influence of male genitalia in the deaths.
Those who navigated the language confusion to correctly assess the killer’s gender orientation leapt to their own speculations: No telling what kind of drugs or hormones – testosterone? – this person may have been taking that helped lead to the carnage.
This already unhinged person was the implicit conclusion. Because only an unhinged person rejects the gender God obviously assigns, present at birth.
Wonder of wonders, the trolls had a two-for-one villain – not just a child-killer but a perverted child-killer! – they could focus their venom on. Just wait and see how quickly the news media drops the story to protect a killer using “woke pronouns,” they predicted.
That doesn’t seem to have happened. Is it possible the trolls do not understand how news works?
Those approaching the issue from the other end of the political spectrum, just as reflexively, quickly focused on the tools used to commit the carnage. “It’s the guns, it’s the guns, it’s the guns,” they repeated, taking note of the presence of an assault rifle in the killer’s armory.
They want sales of such weapons banned for civilians, as they were from 1994 until 2004, when the legislation expired. If only we regulated guns the way we do automobile driving or abortions, they lamented, in a familiar but faulty comparison that quickly fails the Second Amendment test.
Opponents of gun restrictions focused instead on possible measures like universal school security officers or arming teachers. A ludicrous notion, the latter, especially considering that many on that side don’t even trust teachers with books.
Burchett, walking back his “nothing we can do” stance, served up another favorite conservative cure-all: God. “I think our ministers and our communities of faith need to come together and start preaching about love from the Bible,” he said. Instead of ... what?
Here’s the thing: There are no simple solutions. Burchett is at least right in suggesting that the government lacks the power to stop all bad people from doing bad things.
But what reasonable people want – what the hundreds, mostly young, who descended on the legislature to plead for last Thursday and again Monday – is leaders who will at least try to make it harder for bad people to do bad things. Who will acknowledge that guns are a key element in the mess. And that some sort of conversation about what can be done needs to begin.
Meanwhile, you’ve probably seen that some legislative leaders compared Thursday’s events to the lawless mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021. They were in the running for that clueless response award, as well.
I leave you with one other observation. The Davidson County Republican Party recently thanked an outfit for providing meeting space, by giving it an American flag. A plaque describes the gift as being in return for the outfit’s “Patriotism, Service to the Community and the Party.”
The recipient, and welcoming host for the Republicans: the GlockStore, which sells guns and gun accessories.
It’s hard to break up that kind of love affair.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.