“Today is not the day for politics and policy,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Wednesday, as investigators were processing a deadly school shooting in his state that had killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine other people.
“Today is a day for investigation,” said Kemp, a Republican who added that he was “praying for the safety of those in our classrooms,” because that’s what Republicans do in the face of entirely preventable tragedies.
Which is to say, they don’t do anything, because they’ve been praying over this for 25 years, and it doesn’t take a higher power sending a signal in a burning bush to have the common sense to know what to do.
This Kemp guy, of course, is the same guy who tweeted in 2021 his pride at getting a grade of F from a group of gun-safety advocates, saying he would wear the grade “as a badge of honor,” because “our Second Amendment is sacred.”
More sacred, apparently, than the right to life that conservatives pretend is the reason they worked for 50 years to keep women and their doctors from being able to make appropriate choices regarding their reproductive rights.
It emerged in the hours after the shooting at Apalachee High School, in Winder, Ga., roughly 40 miles northeast of Atlanta, that the 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, who will be tried as an adult, had been the focus of a local sheriff’s office investigation last year after he’d made threats about shooting up a middle school online.
His good-guy-with-a-gun dad, Colin Gray, told investigators that he allowed his son to use hunting rifles under his supervision, but stressed that Colt did not have “unfettered access” to them, and the sheriff’s office closed the case.
It’s unclear how Colt Gray, who, again, is 14, two years from being able to get a driver’s license, was able to get access to the AR-style rifle that authorities have said was used in Wednesday’s attack on the high school.
Dad has probably already lawyered up, because even in Georgia, 14-year-olds – even 14-year-olds named Colt – can’t legally buy guys, much less AR-style rifles.
That’s not necessarily because Kemp and Republicans down in Georgia – and Republicans nationwide – have set any kind of line on the prevalence of guns in our society.
Long guns, including rifles, can already be carried in public without a permit under Georgia law, which might explain how a 14-year-old could presumably walk to school with a rifle and somehow not attract attention.
Kemp, in 2022, signed a law, amid much self-generated buzz, allowing Georgians to concealed-carry handguns in public without a permit.
If the idea is that more guns make us safer, we have our latest example from what we saw yesterday in north Georgia.
A kid walked the halls of a high school with an AR-style rifle, with school resource officers on the premises, and did what he said was going to do a year ago – shot up the school.
The Apalachee High School shooting was the 416th school shooting in the U.S. since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Which is to say, it was the 416th day since 1999 that was “not the day for politics and policy,” but rather, “for investigation.”
We’re roughly 9,200 days since Columbine, so, that would mean we’ve had around 8,800 other days for the “politics and policy.”
Odd that we never seem to get around to that part.
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Chris Graham
