School shootings are a distinctly American epidemic, and one that many of us have become disturbingly inured to. While the normal human reaction to hearing about a mass murder like the one that took place at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this week is extreme heartbreak, the typical Republican reaction is to blame everyone and everything but the country’s absurd lack of gun laws for the crime.
But given that the Uvalde attack was the twenty-seventh school shooting in America in 2022 alone, pro-gun pundits are having to find new targets for their faux outrage that aren’t the gun lobby or organizations like the NRA. And Tucker Carlson came up with a real doozy on Wednesday when he declared that pandemic lockdowns are to blame for the two most recent shootings in Texas and Buffalo, New York.
So… just exactly how does that work? Carlson, reacting to recent reports that the pandemic increased reports of mental illness in young people decided to make a pretty big leap:
“Oh, so the lockdowns dramatically increased the instance of mental illness among young people and in ten days, we’ve seen two mass shootings from mentally ill young people. Could there be a connection? Now that’s not finger-pointing. That’s not to blame Fauci for yesterday’s shooting—we’re not that low, we’re not Joe Biden. But if people are becoming mentally ill because they’re disconnected from others, what can we do to connect them to others and thereby reduce the instances of mental illness? That’s a real conversation—is there a more important one?”
Well, how to keep semi-automatic rifles out of the hands of teenagers might be a better place to start, but…
You can watch Carlson’s inanity below.
I knew this one was coming. https://t.co/mtFkJpNKv0
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2022