What say you Christian thanes, grand council of lieges in the White Temple upon the Hill, what’ith thou design against the madness that you speak, the dread consumeth the souls of our people? Canst thou not minister to minds diseas’d, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, bring halt to the violent tribulations it hath wrought?

Fucking seriously, what’s the plan? That little girl, in that picture, taken less than 24 hours ago, is dead now because of a “mental health problem” you say is the root cause behind these ceaseless massacres. “The root of a lot of these issues is mental health, and this has been the case for a long time… COVID certainly didn’t help,” said your guy Tony Gonzales, the Republican Congressman who represents the District in which that beautiful 10 year-old girl, Amerie Jo Garza, breathed her last after a man suffering from this mental health crisis shredded her body with bullets on Tuesday. So Congressman Gonzales, and Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor Greg Abbott, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, and other Senator John Cornyn, what are you going to do to address the malaise you yourselves and/or others in your party say is the root cause of such savagery?

Because we know why you want to blame it on unhinged people. And to be honest, there’s room to work with here. Private gun ownership in China is virtually non-existent at 3.6 per 100,000 citizens compared to the United States’ 120.5 (estimated in 2018 by a Geneva think tank) and even those few are almost certainly restricted to the politically connected and/or personal side pieces owned by active military and law enforcement. Yet there’s a pretty long list of incidents of maniacs attacking Chinese schools with knives or arson or caustic chemicals, at least several of which have resulted in body counts comparable to school shootings here in the US. Usually much more injuries than deaths, but we’re talking about causes, not effects here. China’s a corrupt autocracy whose leaders would be very unlikely to be able to successfully launch a massive campaign to help improve the overall mental health and well-being of its populace even if they wanted to. They don’t.

So where does that leave you Republicans? Should we expect a comprehensive plan, with bipartisan buy-in, to fund a massive expansion of mental health care here in the United States? Will millions upon millions of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, therapists, and all manner of other mental healthcare professionals be trained and hired to address this crisis? President Biden would be very happy to sign such a bill, very thankful if one made it to his desk. He’d invite the sponsors to the White House for the ceremony, even let you Congressman Gonzales and Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott speak for a few minutes about the accomplishment. You can even call it the Uvelde Act, named after the town devastated by this mental health tragedy.

https://twitter.com/kkadence_/status/1529326083392294912

We get it. We know that even if you actually wanted to implement gun control legislation nationally that there’s a good chance you would end up dead because of the mental health crisis, that some militia cosplayer or QAnon freak would gun you down in revenge for betraying them. It’s not just the money from the gun lobby being too sweet to ignore, or the real risk of getting primaried from the right, but the threat to life and limb from your own voters. It’s not right, you are fucking cowards and worms for getting yourselves into this situation from which there is no escape and that children have to die because you’re gutless cunts, but we understand it as a matter of pure survival.

You saw what happened to Gabrielle Giffords and Steve Scalise, barely surviving shooting attacks from armed maniacs, the former now permanently disabled. You know that could just as easily be you next if you piss off the gun owners who you’ve already neglected economically and educationally for decades, hollowing out their futures while pretending brown people and immigrants are the real cause of all their problems and “protecting children” means banning “groomer” books about queer bunnies or “Critical Race Theory” ones written by Black authors.

If the argument goes “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and the killer people are mentally ill, then it’s a safe bet that everyone would be happy with a plan where folks can keep their guns while the mentally ill people with access to them get treatment that significantly reduces the likelihood that they’ll snap and massacre children at school with the guns they can legally own. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than nothing. And that’s what governing’s all about, isn’t it?

So snap to it. Let’s get mentally healthy America! Really excited to see what Republicans have in mind to fix America’s mental health crisis! Shouldn’t be a long wait, right? Right?