This is just a wild story. Really a sign of the times in many ways. A seventy-something Democratic protestor showed up at a Republican event in Arizona with far-right Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. He was clearly there looking to make a stir. The man, Peter Jackson, had on a Black Lives Matter shirt, a “Jail Trump” hat and a mask. So clearly he wasn’t going to blend in. He also had his phone out videotaping. So he clearly wanted a record of how the crowd reacted. But he wasn’t violent in any way. The crowd quickly got violent with him, punching him, knocking him down. The Masters supporters claimed that he attacked a woman. The video clearly shows that’s not true. At one point Masters puts his hands around the guy’s neck and starts throttling him. It would probably be a bit much to say he tried to strangle him. But it wouldn’t be wildly off the mark. Anyway, THIS IS ALL ON VIDEO.

On the long list of excuses and deflections gun rights activists use to shut down any talk of gun regulation, one critical angle comes down to numbers. Mass shootings, school shootings, gun massacres — whatever you want to call them — only make up a tiny percentage of the number of people killed every year by guns in the United States. That’s true. Relatedly, AR-15s, the mass shooters’ firearm of choice, account for only a tiny percentage of overall firearms deaths in the United States. That’s true. Indeed, some noted that the 10 African-Americans murdered in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14th may not even have been a majority of the African-Americans killed by firearms on that single day. Using these very real numbers, gun rights activists portray supporters of assault weapons bans, bans on high capacity magazines and the rest as reactive and innumerate. It’s similar to the way that gun activists sometimes try to shut down restriction conversation by noting how people horrified by all the carnage don’t know all the technical differences between this gun and that one.

I consider myself middle of the road on police and criminal justice reform issues. As I said in the new episode of the podcast just out this afternoon, high crime rates will snuff out criminal justice reform as surely as night follows day. I’d reiterate a point I’ve made at other points over the years: no one has a greater interest in low crime rates than liberals and progressives because high crime rates spawn conservative politics. They don’t just turn the tide against more humane criminal justice policies. They shift the whole political universe in a more authoritarian, conservative direction. Again, just an observable fact.

But with all this said, the narrative emerging out of yesterday’s primaries that voters sent a big rebuke to Democrats over law and order politics or that it was a rejection of criminal justice reformers is at best incomplete.

This afternoon, in response to the arrest of a man who said he planned to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with the subject heading “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”

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.