The only hope to be found following tragedies like the Nashville shooting Monday is that this time will be different. That our leaders will meet the moment. That Republicans, who have long put the gun lobby over the lives of their constituents, will finally “show some courage,” as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre demanded of them Tuesday. But unfortunately, the aftermath of the Nashville school shooting—which left three children and three adults dead—seems to be playing out like countless others before it: with a lot of “thoughts and prayers” from Republicans too cowardly or careless to do anything other than resorting to tortured blame-shifting.
The GOP over the years has pinned mass shootings on everything from mental health to insufficient security to a lack of guns. But after the Covenant School shooter was identified Monday as 28-year-old former student Audrey Hale—who law enforcement officials described as transgender—some on the right immediately folded the tragedy into their existing anti-LGBTQ culture war. Much of the anti-trans scapegoating came from figures in the conservative media, including Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk.
But the dangerous, ugly rhetoric has also been parroted by some GOP officials. “If early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left,” tweeted Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. “How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?” asked Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fringe extremist elevated to the mainstream by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”
The idea that “everyone can stop blaming guns” because the Nashville shooter was identified as trans is, of course, as absurd as it is grotesque. It wasn’t the shooter’s gender identity that killed three nine-year-olds and three school staffers; it was the handgun and two assault weapons Hale used. Those weapons, at least two of which were apparently obtained legally, are the constant in this distinctly American crisis. The United States grants troubled people unprecedented access to deadly weapons. And it’s not just the mass shootings that set America apart from other nations; it’s the daily drumbeat of gun violence, suicides, and accidents.
After last year’s Uvalde school shooting—which some Republicans blamed on insufficiently secure doors—Democrats got some bipartisan support for a gun safety bill, the most substantial to be enacted in decades. “Lives will be saved,” President Joe Biden said at the time. But the limitations of the legislation he signed were laid bare just two months later, when a gunman opened fire on an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago, killing seven and wounding dozens of others. In a dark coincidence, a survivor of that Highland Park shooting— Ashbey Beasley, who was on the way back from lobbying lawmakers in Washington for an assault weapons—happened to be in Nashville Monday when the Covenant shooting unfolded. Beasley was stopping in Nashville to meet with Shaundelle Brooks, the mother of a 2018 mass shooting victim, when Brooks called to let her know that her other son’s school was on lockdown. “Aren’t you guys tired of covering this?” an exasperated Beasley asked the press at the scene, as the too-familiar cycle lurched into gear yet again.
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“I have been lobbying in D.C. since we survived a mass shooting in July,” Beasley said. “How is this still happening? How are our children still dying, and why are we failing them?”