Consistent with Space Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-L. a..) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), if everybody had simply prayed extra, 19 kids and two lecturers would possibly no longer had been massacred by means of a gunman in a Uvalde, Texas, basic faculty ultimate month.
The Space Oversight Committee held a listening to Wednesday on gun violence and heard testimony from survivors and households of sufferers from the Uvalde and Buffalo, New York, mass shootings. The audio system integrated an 11-year-old who coated herself in her good friend’s blood and performed useless as her classmates have been killed.
Gohmert complained in a Space flooring speech that Democrats “certain don’t wish to listen any longer about prayers” as a strategy to the problem.
“They’re disgusted listening to about prayers,” he mentioned.
“Glance, possibly if we heard extra prayers from leaders of this nation as a substitute of taking God’s title in useless, we wouldn’t have the mass killings like we didn’t have earlier than prayer was once eradicated from faculty,” he added.
Scalise used a identical line of reasoning in a information convention, arguing that “we had AR-15s within the Sixties. We didn’t have the ones mass faculty shootings.”
“We in reality had prayer at school all over the ones days,” he mentioned.
In “the ones days,” when school-sponsored prayers have been nonetheless in motion, colleges have been rarely non violent. Many colleges have been nonetheless segregated, and there have been violent campaigns to stay it that manner.
In 1957, as an example ― 5 years earlier than the Preferrred Courtroom struck down state-sponsored prayers in public colleges in 1962 ― an all-white Nashville basic faculty was once bombed an afternoon after a Black kid was once admitted. White church individuals have been main a violent campaign to oppose the mixing of town’s public colleges.
The AR-15 was once first produced two years later, in 1959, predominantly to be used by means of the army. It wasn’t till the Eighties that civilian fashions have been mass produced.
In 1994, President Invoice Clinton signed an attack weapon ban that outlawed the AR-15 and identical semiautomatic rifles after a upward thrust in mass shootings involving the ones kinds of firearms.
Mass shootings have been down within the decade that adopted, when compared with the last decade earlier than and the last decade after.
Scalise and Gohmert are a ways from the primary Republicans to quote a departure from Jesus as a contributor to emerging gun violence. Additionally all over Wednesday’s listening to, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) argued that weapons had at all times been readily to be had within the U.S. however mass shootings have been a newer phenomenon.
He correlated that with a “breakdown of the circle of relatives,” “erosion of religion” and the proliferation of social media. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) argued ultimate month that “we don’t want extra gun keep watch over. We want to go back to God.” And Oklahoma GOP Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer mentioned after the Uvalde capturing it was once time to arm lecturers and “convey again prayer in our public colleges.”
Different Western international locations have transform more and more secular with out seeing expanding gun violence. In Australia, as an example, there hasn’t been a similar mass capturing since 1996, when a bloodbath induced obligatory gun buybacks to take away semi-automatic firearms from civilian ownership.
