Republican U.S. Senator John Thune

School shootings are now as American as baseball and apple pie.

Just the whiff of fall ushers in back-to-school ads, which appear between news stories detailing the brutal slaughter of our children in those schools.

You can set your clock to it. Every year for roughly the past three decades, we’ve known open season on our children was coming, yet we’ve done nothing about it.

Once the school doors open, so does the mass-murder of our children.

Do you know why? Because of Republicans, that’s why.

Say that with me: REPUBLICANS ARE THE CAUSE OF THE SLAUGHTER OF OUR CHILDREN.

They are to blame. No guns, no murders. Less Republicans, less shootings.

This isn’t hard to understand.

Don’t get it twisted.

We always get it twisted. We always make the cause of these shootings way too hard.

It’s not hard.

This a Republican plague on America.

If Republicans didn’t want more and more guns in this country, there’d be less and less children dead in our schools.

I know this, because it wasn’t always this way in America. It really wasn’t.

All these school shooting are a fairly recent thing, which has coincided with the increase in all the guns in this country, and Republicans’ falling at the feet of death-rattling organizations like the National Rifle Association.

There are currently more guns than people in the United States of America, and more children are dying than ever before because of it.

Again, don’t get his twisted. It’s not hard to understand.

Republicans want more guns. Democrats want less guns.

Not only do Republicans want more guns, and Democrats less guns, they want more military-grade weaponry in the hands of our citizenry. These are the kinds of guns that can kill many, many people really, really fast.

Like little children in our classrooms, for instance.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. There were almost no school shootings, and I was raised in a pretty tough city in New Jersey. Nobody worried about being shot in school.

Make that NOBODY.

Did these things happen on the rare occasion?

Of course, but almost never.

And when they did, people — Republicans and Democrats — were appropriately outraged by it, and vowed to make sure they would do everything possible to make sure it never happened again.

Because what kind of society would we be living in, if we accepted the slaughter of our children in their classrooms, as business as usual in America? What kind of society would we be if the best that one of the two major parties could offer up in response to these killings, was some stupid prayer.

So no, shootings weren’t a major problem when I was growing up, because there weren't all these guns that Republicans have since eagerly introduced.

Again, please don’t get this twisted.

And let me duck in here and ask a quick question: Do you want more guns, or less guns?

I bet you want less guns, because you care about our children. Everything should be done to protect our children.

Democrats believe that. Republicans don’t.

Don’t get it twisted.

Me? I don’t want any guns. NONE. Zero.

I was in the service, and I know what guns do. Guns are designed for one purpose: to kill things.

Let’s say that again, too, America: GUNS ARE DESIGNED FOR ONE PURPOSE: TO KILL THINGS.

That’s all they are good for: KILLING THINGS.

Why do people want to kill things?

That’s a real damn problem right there. It’s sick.

If you want to kill things, you are a complete sicko.

Broken.

Again don’t get it twisted. Don’t make it hard.

I haven’t touched a gun since I was in the military, because guns kill things. People who have guns have them for one reason: to kill things.

But, sure, let’s introduce more and more guns into our society. Let’s make them available everywhere. Let’s make guns easier to get than registering to vote.

All these guns are a Republican problem. They have even gotten to the point of telling us that more guns make us safer.

Seriously.

Republicans want people to have more guns to protect themselves from all the guns out there.

Now THAT’S twisted.

An anecdote. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, All in the Family was the No. 1 TV show in America for many years. The protagonist, Archie Bunker, was basically a well-meaning bigot, who generally collapsed under the weight of his own ignorance by the end of each episode.

Back then we didn’t have many mass-murders in our schools, but we did have the occasional hijacking. So what was Archie’s answer to this problem?

Arm everybody on the plane, so that they could shoot any prospective hijacker that boarded said plane.

Talk about twisted ...

But we knew twisted logic back then. We knew that more guns meant more killings. We knew Archie was a complete idiot. Occasionally lovable, but an idiot.

Now we don’t, because Republicans are telling us they think more guns will mean less school shootings. It’s as if we have thousands of Archie Bunkers running our country.

Oh, and did I mention Archie was a bigot? Because the biggest single year-on-year increase in gun sales until COVID, was the year Barack Obama was elected …

Republicans tell us more guns will make us safer when they know for a fact that America is the only place in the civilized world where mass-murder has been reduced to just another way of life — before death, that is ...

I have lived all over this world, and America is the only place I worry about being shot to death when I go into a mall, a movie theater, a restaurant, a school, a library, a museum, a zoo, or attend a parade or a ballgame.

People in other countries think we are completely out of our minds.

You know why? Because they know that if we didn’t have all of these guns we wouldn’t have all of these shootings.

They aren’t twisted.

Are you still twisted? Is this hard to understand? It shouldn’t be, because again: Guns kill things. The more guns, the more killings.

Say, have you seen that the racist in the White House is currently introducing more guns into our cities to keep them safer?

The children in our cities, small towns and suburbs are under attack from mass-murdering madmen with guns. So what’s he doing? Sending our military and their guns into our cities, while warning about immigrants eating our dogs and cats in those suburbs.

Talk about twisted.

This afternoon, hundreds of lives will never be the same because a man with a gun slaughtered two children and wounded 17 others in a church attended by Catholic school children in Minneapolis.

Who then has the gall, besides every grotesque Republican in America, to think the appropriate response to this tragedy is to pray for these children, when they were shot in a church … praying?

Apparently they don’t see the sheer hypocrisy and evil insult in this.

Twisted.

America has Republicans to thank for our children’s bloody bodies being splattered all over the walls, floors and ceilings of our schools.

THEY ARE TO BLAME.

I am literally praying we don’t get this reasoning twisted yet again ...

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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.