Trump and Jeb! on guns
by digby
I take a backseat to no one when it comes to my loathing of Jeb Bush. He is the human manifestation of aristocratic rot as far as I’m concerned. But I have to admit that I think he got a bum rap on the “stuff happens” thing. Not that I don’t believe he wants to just throw up his hands and say “whatever” to the problem of gun violence. That’s the official Republican position. But his actual statement the other day was a little bit more complex than that. Here ‘s what he said:
“We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s very sad to see. But I resist the notion, and I had this challenge as governor—look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis. The impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
He sounds like Poppy, the guy who told the press that his campaign strategy was “message: I care.” In other words kind of a dope when it comes to retail politics. And I certainly disagree that when it comes to gun violence there is any hysterical rush to “do something.” The opposite is true. Over and over again we do absolutely nothing. But what he said so clumsily is something I’ve said myself when it comes to passing terrorism laws — the impulse in the aftermath of a crisis is to immediately “do something” and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do. Like pulling the Patriot Act off the shelf and passing it without giving any thought to what it really meant. That’s what he was saying, not that mass shootings are no biggie. And again, he’s completely wrong that anyone’s rushing to “do something” about gun violence in the wake of our weekly mass shooting. It’s ridiculous. But he wasn’t just shrugging his shoulders and saying “shit happens” when asked about the Oregon bloodbath.
Ugh, I hate defending the likes of Bush but honestly it’s a very bad idea to encourage the press to engage in pile-ons that are based on erroneous assumptions about what someone said. Let’s just say it tends to blow back on liberals more than anyone.
Meanwhile, here’s Trump being a lot more, shall we say, open about what wingnuts really think.
“I have to say, no matter what you do, you’re gonna have problems.
“Because you have sick people. They happen to be intelligent. And, you know, they can be sick as hell and they’re geniuses in a certain way. They are going to be able to break the system.”
The New York real-estate billionaire, who boasts of possessing a concealed carry permit, said he did not see the need for increased firearms regulations after the mass shooting in Oregon.
He amplified the argument in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, saying: “The gun laws have nothing to do with this. This is mental illness.”
At a rally in suburban Nashville on Saturday, Trump mentioned his New York state handgun carry permit and added that anyone who attacked him would be “shocked”, because he would emulate Charles Bronson in the vigilante film Death Wish.
“I’m a very, very big second amendment person,” Trump said in Tennessee. “This is about self-defense, plain and simple.”
Trump reminisced about the Bronson-starring 1974 film and got people in the crowd to shout out the title in unison. In the movie, an affluent, liberal architect embarks on a vigilante mission after his wife is killed and his daughter raped.
“Today you can’t make that movie because it’s not politically correct,” Trump said.
Speaking to NBC, Trump said those US jurisdictions with “the strongest, the most stringent laws [on gun control] are in almost every case the worst places. It doesn’t seem to work.”
Instead, at both rally and in the interview, as on the day of the shooting, the Republican frontrunner blamed mental illness for such shootings as that at Umpqua Community College.
That’s the kind of thing Republicans believe about guns — that they will be Charles Bronson if someone threatens them with a gun. Or Wyatt Earp — who, by the way, confiscated guns in Dodge City. It’s just braindead nonsense.
And, by the way, Trump obviously doesn’t get out much. Vigilante movies are as big as ever.
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