Francis Wilkinson: Mass shootings are a result of the GOP's moral collapse

In theory, school shootings are tragic.

Indeed, after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia — four murdered, nine injured — Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey expressed gratitude that “a much larger tragedy” had been prevented. It was a win, of sorts.

I don’t mean to criticize Hosey. But the notion that mass shootings constitute a genuine tragedy is inconsistent with the sturdy refusal to reduce their number or severity. “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” said GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance.

A wealthy, technologically advanced society that declares “nothing can be done” when quite a lot can be done is making a statement about its hierarchy of values. In many locales, including Georgia, guns, and the men who cherish them, are higher on the list than children and those who cherish them.

In an effort to cast mass murder in a more negative light and assign responsibility for its frequency, anti-violence activists have taken to calling shootings like the one in Georgia “a choice.” As political rhetoric, I don’t know how effective that is. But as a statement of fact, “choice” is indisputable. People in France, for example, choose to make it difficult to commit mass murder with a semi-automatic firearm. People in the state of Georgia, on the other hand, choose to make it very easy.

That choice flows directly from an ideology that privileges criminals and other individual bad actors over the freedom and safety of society at large. After all, why would lawmakers enable someone to buy a gun at a flea market without a background check, as Georgia does, if they valued society’s prerogative to life more than the unfettered sway of the most violent individual in the state? Why not simply funnel all gun buyers into the background-check system, which takes only minutes to process? The answer, of course, is that Georgia lawmakers deliberately choose not to. They value the killer’s self-actualizing autonomy.

You can see that same choice, derived from the same ideology, across multiple fields. During the height of the (continuing, mutating) COVID pandemic, many Republican politicians and their favored constituents rebelled against vaccine and mask mandates to mitigate the spread of a highly contagious virus.Why should I wear a mask to reduce a lethal threat to an immunocompromised neighbor? Don’t tread on me. Indeed, some anti-mask fanatics responded violently to a temporary social compact to protect their neighbors (and themselves) in an emergency. Such resistance was accompanied by a widespread, wholly pathological, denial that COVID was even real. Predictably, after the introduction of vaccines, higher death rates from COVID ensued in Republican precincts.

As climate change imposes increasingly deadly consequences in the U.S. and across the globe, Republicans once again not only tolerate but privilege the killers, fossil fuels. Donald Trump is unintelligible when he discusses wind turbines, which he apparently believes are failing to power someone’s television set somewhere. But through his dystopian dreamscape, the GOP presidential nominee makes his hostility to clean energy, and its life-saving potential to mitigate climate catastrophe, very clear. (There is, of course, a typically Trumpian emphasis on self-interest, as well. In spring, Trump solicited $1 billion in political contributions from oil executives while pledging, quid pro quo, to free them from regulations.)

Such Republican choices are repeated over and over as ideology calcifies into habit. Rather than safeguard the U.S. Treasury, the collective assets of the nation, and require individuals and corporations to pay their legally designated share, Republicans demand that Internal Revenue Service agents be fired and disempowered. Just as they privilege the individual polluter over the collective environment, Republicans privilege the individual tax cheat over the collective purse.

Gun-rights extremism is perhaps the most obvious vector of an ideology that began veering into pathology even before the GOP nominated Trump, a convicted criminal described as “unfit” by much of his own cabinet and White House staff, for president a second and then a fantastical third time. Much first-level gun-violence prevention is the equivalent of low-hanging policy fruit. Universal background checks. Safe-storage laws. Red-flag laws to enable authorities to remove firearms from certifiably dangerous individuals. No permitless carry. But to many in the clutches of nihilism, even minor safeguards to protect human life appear excessive.

Trump evinces such hatred for 21st century pluralistic America — for its people, its values, its folkways, its ambitions — that it’s perhaps unsurprising to see nihilism so firmly rooted among his tribe. When the Giffords Law Center awarded Georgia an “F” grade for its slapdash gun policies, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, responded on social media: “I’ll wear this “F” as a badge of honor. Our 2nd Amendment is sacred, and I’ll never back down from defending Georgians’ constitutional rights.” His defense is a success: The firearm death rate in Georgia is almost 4 times higher than in New York.

Jingoism and bluster are time-honored substitutes for patriotism and decency, just as demagogy makes a handy camouflage for cowardice. In the days ahead, we’ll learn more details of the shooting at Apalachee High School. What menu of weaponry was made accessible to a disturbed boy? Which adult failed at which moment? Yet how much can such details really matter? As long as the nation is subject to the nihilism of men who choose death over responsibility, and individual pathology over collective freedom, the slaughter will continue across a landscape disfigured by moral collapse.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.