'The slaughter will continue': Columnist blames mass shootings on GOP’s 'moral collapse'

06 September 2024

Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, were quick to pounce on Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in response to his comments on a school shooting in Georgia that left four people dead and has resulted in murder charges for the 14-year-old suspect.

At a Thursday, September 5 event in Phoenix, former President Donald Trump's running mate told a reporter, "I don't like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they're not able to."

In a blistering opinion column published the following day, Bloomberg News' Francis Wilkinson argues that school shootings are a reflection of the GOP's "moral collapse."

"In an effort to cast mass murder in a more negative light and assign responsibility for its frequency," Wilkinson writes, "anti-violence activists have taken to calling shootings like the one in Georgia 'a choice.' As political rhetoric, I don't know how effective that is. But as a statement of fact, 'choice' is indisputable."

The Bloomberg News columnist continues, "People in France, for example, choose to make it difficult to commit mass murder with a semi-automatic firearm. People in the state of Georgia, on the other hand, choose to make it very easy. That choice flows directly from an ideology that privileges criminals and other individual bad actors over the freedom and safety of society at large."

Lawmakers, Wilkinson laments, make shootings more likely when they "enable someone to buy a gun at a flea market without a background check."

"Gun-rights extremism is perhaps the most obvious vector of an ideology that began veering into pathology even before the GOP nominated Trump, a convicted criminal described as 'unfit' by much of his own cabinet and White House staff, for president a second and then a fantastical third time," the columnist explains. "Much first-level gun-violence prevention is the equivalent of low-hanging policy fruit. Universal background checks. Safe-storage laws. Red-flag laws to enable authorities to remove firearms from certifiably dangerous individuals. No permitless carry."

Wilkinson adds, "But to many in the clutches of nihilism, even minor safeguards to protect human life appear excessive…. As long as the nation is subject to the nihilism of men who choose death over responsibility, and individual pathology over collective freedom, the slaughter will continue across a landscape disfigured by moral collapse."

Francis Wilkinson's full Bloomberg News column is available at this link (subscription required).

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