{"id":18077,"date":"2021-03-25T18:52:32","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T01:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=18077"},"modified":"2021-03-25T18:53:11","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T01:53:11","slug":"republicans-bravely-announce-plans-to-do-nothing-to-stop-mass-shootings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/03\/25\/republicans-bravely-announce-plans-to-do-nothing-to-stop-mass-shootings\/","title":{"rendered":"REPUBLICANS BRAVELY ANNOUNCE PLANS TO DO NOTHING TO STOP MASS SHOOTINGS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY BESS LEVIN<\/a> MARCH 23, 2021 (vanityfair.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Sen.
BY TOM WILLIAMS-POOL\/GETTY IMAGES.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sorry they\u2019re not sorry about all the senseless, easily preventable killings. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One happy by-product of a terrible year that\u2019s kept millions of people at home has been the sharp reduction<\/a> in mass shootings in the U.S.\u2014in 2020, there were just two, the last one occurring within days of the World Heath Organization officially declaring<\/a> the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. And while the coronavirus is far from over\u2014in fact, new cases are on the rise<\/a> in 27 states with worrisome variants \u201cspreading rapidly<\/a>\u201d\u2014various parts of the country opening up<\/a> because \u201cit\u2019s springtime<\/a>\u201d has led to a return to prepandemic life for many, which in America means a return to looking at one\u2019s phone and learning that countless people were just murdered. And that, of course, means having to once again hear from spineless Republicans whose top priority is ensuring someone intent on killing a bunch of people can buy a gun to do so as quickly as possible<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During a hearing on gun violence on Tuesday\u2014one day after a lone gunman killed 10 people in Colorado and a week after a separate gunman killed eight people in the Atlanta area\u2014Senator Ted Cruz<\/strong> moaned that \u201cevery time there is a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders.\u201d In a little catnip to the \u201cthey\u2019re taking our guns!\u201d crowd, he added, falsely, that Democrats want to strip \u201claw-abiding citizens\u201d of their right to bear arms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Called out for offering \u201cthoughts and prayers,\u201d i.e. the constant refrain of shameless politicians who insist on doing nothing to prevent mass shootings, Cruz sneered, \u201cI don\u2019t apologize for thoughts or prayers,\u201d saying that he \u201cbelieve[s] in the power of prayer.\u201d (Incidentally, prayer has yet to get gun control legislation passed.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Picking up where Cruz left off, Senator John Kennedy<\/strong> compared<\/a> mass shootings to drunk driving, forgetting that one must obtain a government-issued license to drive a car and register that vehicle, which makes it considerably more difficult to drive drunk than it is to get a gun and kill 10 people while they\u2019re grocery shopping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there was Senator Tom Cotton,<\/strong> who thinks mass shootings in the U.S. are not an issue of ridiculously lax gun laws and the stranglehold the NRA has on people like him<\/a>, but a matter of rhetoric:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Echoing Cruz, Senator Cynthia M. Lummis<\/strong> opined<\/a> that \u201cEvery time that there\u2019s an incident like this, the people who don\u2019t want to protect the Second Amendment use it as an excuse to further erode Second Amendment rights.\u201d (In fact, people use \u201cincident[s]\u201d like these as prime examples of why gun control legislation is necessary.) For his part, freshman Senator Tommy Tuberville,<\/strong> who doesn\u2019t know<\/a> the three branches of government, said Tuesday, \u201cI think we\u2019ve got enough background checks.\u201d In other words, the GOP is not going to do a single thing to stop gun violence but they look forward to pretending to care after the next mass shooting, which is presumably just around the corner<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans are, however, all over fake voter fraud<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump lawyer Sidney Powell: No one with half a brain would actually believe all that bullshit we said about Trump winning<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not her fault if most of Donald Trump\u2019s supporters bought what she was selling, is the argument her<\/em> lawyers are now trying to make<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right-wing lawyer Sidney Powell is claiming in a new court filing that reasonable people wouldn’t have believed as fact her assertions of fraud after the 2020 presidential election. The election infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell for defamation after she pushed lawsuits and made appearances in conservative media on behalf of then-President Donald Trump<\/strong> to sow doubt about the 2020 election results. Dominion claims that Powell knew her election fraud accusations were false and hurtful to the company. In a new court filing, Powell\u2019s attorneys write that she was sharing her \u201copinion\u201d and that the public could reach \u201ctheir own conclusions\u201d about whether votes were changed by election machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGiven the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump,\u201d Powell’s defense lawyers wrote in a court filing on Monday. \u201cIndeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as \u2018wild accusations\u2019 and \u2018outlandish claims.\u2019 They are repeatedly labelled \u2018inherently improbable\u2019 and even \u2018impossible.\u2019 Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants\u2019 position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, a whole lot of people believed Powell\u2019s baseless claims of election fraud, hence the attack on the Capitol that left five people dead, as Michigan Republican Peter Meijer<\/strong> noted on Twitter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Powell definitely didn\u2019t sound like she was merely offering her \u201copinion\u201d when she appeared with a hair-dye-streaked Rudy Giuliani<\/strong> at a press conference during which she insisted<\/a>, among other things, the election was rigged by \u201ccommunist money\u201d in a scheme orchestrated by Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, who died seven years earlier. Though now that she\u2019s been sued for $1.3 billion<\/a> we can understand why she\u2019d want to claim otherwise!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY BESS LEVIN MARCH 23, 2021 (vanityfair.com) Sorry they\u2019re not sorry about all the senseless, easily preventable killings.  One happy by-product of a terrible year that\u2019s kept millions of people at home has been the sharp reduction in mass shootings in the U.S.\u2014in 2020, there were just two, the last one occurring within… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18077"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18079,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077\/revisions\/18079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}