school shooting

As my colleague Emine Yücel just reported, Tennessee Republicans have voted to expel one of the three Democrats who participated in a protest that broke out in the state House last week, as children and parents showed up to demand expanded gun control in the wake of another school shooting.

Emine and I followed the livestream of floor proceeding closely all afternoon and the rhetoric was, honestly, shocking. As Republicans gave lengthy, cringe speeches about the importance of following House rules, demanding to know how Rep. Justin Jones (D) carried a concealed bullhorn into the House chamber, yelled about him wearing the wrong type of lapel pin and argued that the Democrat from Nashville was intentionally creating chaos on the House floor to get attention because he is young, Democrats pleaded with their colleagues to drop the embarrassing crusade.

There’s a lot of commotion to come as we wait for the details of the indictment and watch Donald Trump’s arraignment, and the circus around it, unfold over the next 24 hours, but I wanted to bring your attention to a small yet concerning trend I’ve noticed taking shape in the past week as Republicans continue to downplay the Jan. 6 insurrection.

We’ve been covering Republicans’ various deflection strategies (if you can even call them strategies) on addressing gun reform in the wake of the latest mass shootings in the U.S. for a few weeks. You might even be tired of it by now — we’ve heard it all, blaming everything from “doors” to abortion access to trans-rights for the mass shootings that plague our nation.

In the wake of three recent mass shootings in America in the last two weeks, Republicans are once again showing their collective ass, deploying a litany of talking points about random stuff to clog up the national discourse on gun violence with anything and everything but guns.

It’s all very pellucid — a distraction tactic to avoid engaging seriously on the issue of our nation’s unprecedentedly lax gun laws and the need for national — or even state level! — gun control reform. And Republican Rep. Billy Long (MO) just dangerously added a befuddling new culprit to the mix: abortion is to blame for mass shootings.