We’re in the aftermath of yet another American school shooting, so that really means only one thing: acres and acres of equivocating bullshit from people and organisations who don’t want to confront the fact that the read availability of firearms might have something to do with the country’s disproportionately vast levels of gun violence.
We already had the Lieutenant Governor of Texas suggest that the problem was absolutely the fact that Santa Fe High School had too many doors, and now we’ve got a fresh new angle courtesy of the incoming National Rifle Association president Oliver North. His argument? It’s the Ritalin, folks.
Without evidence, he laid it out:
The problem we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease. And the disease, in this case, isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence, they’ve been drugged in many cases. Nearly all of these perpetrators are male and they’re young teenagers in most cases.
Many of these young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten. Now I’m certainly not a doctor, I’m a marine, but I can see those kinds of things happening and endangering those two gals.
“I’m certainly not a doctor, I’m a marine,” is an excellent way to kick off a psychological discussion, in my humble opinion.
The name Oliver North might ring familiar to you. He’s best known for being embroiled in one of the biggest US political scandals of the late 1980s – the Contra scandal – where he was accused of facilitating the illegal sale of weapons to Iran as part of a convoluted scheme to fund right-wing militias in Nicaragua. His name has been shorthand for dirty politics and subterfuge for a while, so maybe he’s a great fit as head of the NRA.
North also parroted the standard right-wing talking point about the Santa Fe shooting: it could have been solved with intense school security, like metal detectors.
“If you want to stop the carnage, look, you’re not gonna fix it by taking away the rights of law-abiding citizens. You’ve got to fix it in a way that hardens the place sufficiently that those kids are safe inside the door,” he said.
“If that means five metal detectors getting in and out of the high school, you get five metal detectors.”
More normal politics from the land of the free and home of the brave.
