Just days after a teenage gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, nearly half of Republican voters told pollsters that mass murders were “unfortunately, something we have to accept as part of a free society.”
Break that down.
Forty-four percent of GOP voters say that “we have to accept” the slaughter of children on a more or less regular basis, because they are the collateral damage of living in a free society.
Don’t slide past that poll number, because it gives us a glimpse of how broken our discourse has become, when weapons become fetishes of manhood and guns designed to blow human beings apart are embraced as symbols of “freedom.”
There is no confusion or misunderstanding here, because the wording of the question was clear and blunt (“Do you feel that mass shootings are___”), and the memories of the murders in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, were still fresh. Media reports were still showing […]
I didn’t see any questions that asked if your child died in a mass shooting (classified as 4+ people dead), would you still claim that their death was part of the price of freedom?