Q Toon: Sticking to His Guns

Last Thursday, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto asked Senator Ron Johnson for his reaction to the horrific murder of 19 third- and fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old armed with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

"Do you think we would require stiffer background checks?" Cavuto asked RoJo.

“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” Johnson shot back. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues.”

Reiterating his belief that the solution lies in “renewed faith” and “strong families, Johnson then quickly leaned into the latest right-wing moral panic.

“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness,” the senator fumed. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Pushing back, Cavuto interjected: “But school shootings have been happening long before CRT.”

Undeterred, Johnson asserted that “CRT’s been going on under the radar for quite some time as well,” declaring that “wokeness” and “liberal indoctrination” have also been going on for a long time.

“This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law’s going to, it’s not going to solve it, it’s not going to solve it,” he concluded.

If I shared Wisconsin's senior senator's confidence that banning "wokeness" was going to solve our gun problem, and if I thought that Critical Race Theory had the slightest relevance to any of this, I'd be right RoJo's pushing for a return to teaching heterosexual white male supremacy. 

But I don't.

Nor do I think that it's at all practical to post guards armed as if for World War III at every entrance to every school building, grocery store, hospital, movie theater, house of worship, fast food diner, office holiday party, and open-air garlic / music festival.

But since Ron Johnson, and the rest of the GOP, are steadfast in their belief that American gun killings have nothing whatsoever to do with American guns, give him an E for Effort for trying to link the carnage to some Republican talking point, any Republican talking point.