House Republicans, who have been hellbent on finding ways to make guns easier to access, have offered nothing but their thoughts and prayers in response to the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
“We are all reeling from this horror in Las Vegas,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan in a press conference. “This is just awful.”
Yes, it is awful. And though Ryan is one of the few people in this country who could actually do something that would help prevent senseless tragedies like mass shootings happen, it seems that he and fellow Republicans have nothing much to suggest aside from encouraging people to donate blood.
For the umpteenth time, Democrats are calling for tighter restrictions on guns, which are easier to obtain in most parts of this country than an abortion. The AP reports that, following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Republicans will table two aggressive, NRA-backed bills that would allow people to legally carry concealed weapons in states that have tight restrictions, overriding local laws for concealed weapons, and would loosen restrictions on gun silencers. Gun silencers would make it harder for police to identify a mass shooter in a crowd.
On the gun silencer bill, Ryan told the AP that it’s “not scheduled right now.”
“I don’t know when it will be scheduled,” he added.
Despite all the evidence that says otherwise, Ryan and his ilk don’t see a correlation between lax gun laws and mass shootings. In an interview with the AP last month, he instead attributed the frequent acts of domestic terrorism to mental illness, telling the AP that gun control was not the solution. “But if you’re saying that this Republican Congress is going to infringe upon Second Amendment rights, we’re not going to do that,” he said. Ironically, just as he was trying to snatch healthcare away from millions of Americans, Ryan instead argued that mass shootings would be avoided by mental health reform.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz echoed a similar sentiment. “The fact that a psychopathic killer murdered innocents is cause for grief. It’s cause for more vigorous law enforcement—for stopping madmen and killers,” he told Time Magazine. “But it is not an excuse for Democrats to try and strip away Second Amendment rights from law-abiding citizens.”