Editors’ Blog

We’re watching what seems like at least a mini-exodus of musical acts and elected officials from the NRA conference in Texas. Arch jingoist Lee Greenwood is out. Gov. Abbott is now going to send a taped message rather than attending in person. Now we’ve learned that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an even more antic rightwinger, is sending his regrets as well.

To be clear, all these worthies are claiming that their support for guns and the NRA is wholly undiminished. The elected officials also have something of an out since they can say that their decision isn’t about the NRA at all. They’re just urgently needed on the ground in Uvalde to deal with the aftermath of the shooting.

But actions here speak louder than words.

There are some specific nuances I wanted to share with you.

We’ve noted a number of times that early accounts of school shootings are subject to the “fog of war” – chaotic uncertainty about what is happening, factual claims that turn out not to be true and more. That is ending up to be the case in the Uvalde shooting even more than I expected. The initial story was that the shooter was confronted by and exchanged gunfire with a school police officer and then exchanged gunfire with two municipal police officers just after he had entered the school. Body armor was a key part of why the shooter came out on top in those engagements. An account I read early yesterday said that each of those three officers received gun shot wounds – a fact that stands in contrast to the idea that they just ran for cover and didn’t do their job.

But now it seems like basically none of that happened.

Don’t miss Matt Shuham’s rundown of the events in Michigan today. Five candidates for Governor, including the two frontrunners, were kicked off the ballot for collectively submitting tens of thousands of forged signatures on their ballot petitions. The hearing itself included about as much comedy as you might expect. One ejected candidate complained that the whole situation was the state’s fault for not warning candidates not to hire forgers to collect signatures for them. Another complained that the state hadn’t told them soon enough how many forgeries they were submitting. Needless to say they all agreed it was an outrage, that the state should deem their forged signatures legitimate (for some unexplained reason) and generally give them a forgery mulligan.

But there’s some electoral politics stuff going on here in the background I wanted to be sure is on your radar.

We already know a bunch of details about ex-President Trump’s proclivity for ripping papers into tiny shreds after he was finished reading them during his presidency, leaving the work of taping the documents back together to National Archives staffers.

We also learned that Trump liked to discard documents in other weird ways a few months ago, back when reports first surfaced that indicated White House staffers might’ve improperly handled some top secret documents when Trump brought boxes of records to Mar-a-Lago after he exited the White House. Those reports included befuddling details about Trump’s penchant for flushing records down the toilet when he was done reading them.

But it appears the unconventional (*cough* maybe illegal *cough*) document-destruction extended beyond the former president himself — a man who we all know had a lot of mystifying habits to begin with.

I’ve gotten a great deal of pushback to my “Candor” post in which I argued that a “functional majority” of the country in fact supports the gun status quo. It’s not big money or the gun lobby. It’s us. This is what we seem to want. One longtime reader said my comments amounted to a city slicker demonization of rural America. Another good friend said I was discounting the role of opinion shaping institutions like Fox News. And yet another said I was mistaking preference for inertia.

I took these criticisms seriously because these are each serious people. As so often is the case the disagreements are as much semantic as they are based on different readings of the facts at hand. I said a “functional majority” since I’m pretty sure if we held a plebiscite the status quo wouldn’t come out on top. But we don’t govern by plebiscite. Pro-gun America has all sorts of built in advantages — regionalism, the rural-urban split, intensity and a lot more. Inertia is certainly a big factor too. And what about all the polls that show overwhelming, sometimes verging on unanimous support for things like red flag laws and background checks?

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Texas school shooting and Tuesday’s primary races.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

I favor licensing of gun use and ownership on the model of drivers’ licensing and automobile registration, but I want to comment instead on the politics of gun control. In the wake of this latest school massacre, Democrats and a handful of Republicans may pass something, but it is unlikely they will get sixty votes for a measure that might actually curtail gun use. It’s a question of salience — and similar considerations apply to the politics of student loans and abortion.

As I noted yesterday, early reports of mass shootings are subject to the fog of war. Initial details are incomplete or wrong. We already have some substantial revisions to what happened when the shooter initially entered the school. As I noted, the first reports suggested that the gunman had shot his way past three officers — one school police force officer and two municipal police officers. The picture now looks significantly different — though the overall picture, I would argue, is much the same.

According to the latest reports, a school security officer exchanged gun fire with the shooter prior to the shooter entering the school. The two municipal police officers exchanged gunfire with the shooter once he was already in the school but — apparently — before he had actually begun shooting kids. They apparently felt they were outgunned. So they called in backup.

Here is the part of the story that is new and deeply disturbing. Apparently police on the scene waited for a significant period of time — like tens of minutes — while parents outside the schools begged them to go in and kill the shooter. Parents even brainstormed about whether they should go in and rush the shooter themselves since the mass shooting was unfolding as everyone waited outside.

Just a few days after gunmen entered Columbine High School in 1999 and murdered 13 students and adults, the National Rifle Association found itself in a situation darkly similar to what we’re seeing play out this week.

At the time, the gun group had plans to hold their annual national gathering just a few days after the school shooting that rocked a generation of Americans. And it was set to take place a few miles away from the scene of the massacre, in Denver.

As is the case today, NRA leaders ultimately opted to carry on with the planned convention, concerned that canceling it would rob officials of the opportunity to own the organization’s response to the tragedy, which was the deadliest school shooting during that decade in America.

In the interests of fairness and honesty with ourselves, we should be clear that this isn’t about standing up to the “gun lobby.” Yes, the NRA and other related groups play an important role coordinating messaging and operationalizing the desires of gun obsessives. But President Biden’s comment was one of the few times for me that he really did sound like someone speaking from a bygone era. A vast swathe of the population wants things exactly how they are. No restrictions on guns at all. The collateral damage is just tough shit basically.