According to House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), if everybody had simply prayed extra, 19 kids and two academics may not have been massacred by a gunman in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary faculty final month.
The House Oversight Committee held a listening to Wednesday on gun violence and heard testimony from survivors and households of victims from the Uvalde and Buffalo, New York, mass shootings. The audio system included an 11-year-old who coated herself in her good friend’s blood and performed lifeless as her classmates had been killed.
Gohmert complained in a House ground speech that Democrats “sure don’t want to hear any more about prayers” as an answer to the problem.
“They’re disgusted hearing about prayers,” he stated.
“Look, maybe if we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God’s name in vain, we wouldn’t have the mass killings like we didn’t have before prayer was eliminated from school,” he added.
Scalise used an analogous line of reasoning in a news conference, arguing that “we had AR-15s in the 1960s. We didn’t have those mass school shootings.”
“We actually had prayer in school during those days,” he stated.
In “those days,” when school-sponsored prayers had been nonetheless in motion, colleges had been hardly peaceable. Many colleges had been nonetheless segregated, and there have been violent campaigns to maintain it that approach.
In 1957, for instance ― 5 years earlier than the Supreme Court struck down state-sponsored prayers in public colleges in 1962 ― an all-white Nashville elementary faculty was bombed a day after a Black little one was admitted. White church members had been main a violent campaign to oppose the combination of town’s public colleges.
The AR-15 was first produced two years later, in 1959, predominantly to be used by the navy. It wasn’t till the 1980s that civilian fashions had been mass produced.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapon ban that outlawed the AR-15 and comparable semiautomatic rifles after an increase in mass shootings involving these sorts of firearms.
Mass shootings were down within the decade that adopted, in contrast with the last decade earlier than and the last decade after.
Scalise and Gohmert are removed from the primary Republicans to quote a departure from Jesus as a contributor to rising gun violence. Also throughout Wednesday’s listening to, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) argued that weapons had at all times been available within the U.S. however mass shootings had been a newer phenomenon.
He correlated that with a “breakdown of the family,” “erosion of faith” and the proliferation of social media. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) argued final month that “we don’t need more gun control. We need to return to God.” And Oklahoma GOP Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer stated after the Uvalde capturing it was time to arm academics and “bring back prayer in our public schools.”
Other Western countries have turn into more and more secular with out seeing growing gun violence. In Australia, for instance, there hasn’t been a comparable mass capturing since 1996, when a bloodbath prompted necessary gun buybacks to take away semi-automatic firearms from civilian possession.
