Insight

“Between newspaper stunts and newspaper suppressions on the one side, and dictatorships with their censorships on the other, it is highly probable that our immediate posterity will know less about what is going on than they did before there was a printing press.” —G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Demagogues

“After Beto O'Rourke confronted Texas Governor Abbott’s press conference, the MAGA governor gave some empty platitudes about healing and hope. He asked people to put their agendas aside and think about someone other than themselves. My God. How dare he. What an absolute fraud the governor of Texas is.” —Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer

“Governor Abbott, will you ask your MAGA buddies and your NRA pals to put aside their agendas and think of someone other than themselves, like you asked the families to do? … Of course not.” —Chuck Schumer

“No amount of bloodshed seems to be enough for MAGA Republicans.” —Chuck Schumer

“The NRA has blood on its hands. It must be disbanded.” —Congressman Jake Auchincloss

Useful Idiots

“Republicans [are] just tying themselves into pretzels to point the finger at every single thing but the problem — the gun.” —MSNBC’s Joy Reid

“We won’t acknowledge that we are a violent people to begin with. This country was birthed in violence with the genocide of the native people at the barrel of a gun. This country was built on the backs of slaves with a gun to their backs to build this country into the country that we got to have. … I think that we need some really drastic action here. We need a moratorium, perhaps, on gun sales. Who will say … in the next few days, ‘It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment’? ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ Well, why not? Why not? I truly believe if Jefferson and Washington and Madison — if they all knew that the bullet would be invented some 50 years after our revolution, I don’t know if they would have written it that way. They didn’t even know what a bullet was. It didn’t exist until the 1830s. If they had any idea that there would be this kind of carnage, you have to believe that the Founders of the country wouldn’t support it.” —filmmaker Michael Moore

“The blood of every child that dies of gun violence in this country is on the hands of the Republican Party.” —filmmaker Rob Reiner

“DON’T SAVE FETUSES ONLY TO HAVE THEM DIE AT SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU LOVE YOUR GUNS MORE THAN LIFE! FOR SHAME!!” —actress Bette Midler

“Evil Racist Gun Shooting Retrumplikkans who claim to love the lives of children when in fact they COULDN’T Care Less.” —actress Rosannna Arquette

“F**k the GOP and their obsession with guns.” —actress Alyssa Milano

“F**K THE NRA.” —actress Rosie O'Donnell

The BIG Lie

“The Second Amendment is not absolute. When it was passed, you … couldn’t own a cannon. You couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons.” —Joe Biden (“Once again, there were no federal laws barring cannon ownership when the Second Amendment was enacted. Gun laws remained local matters and I do not know of any bans on cannons or other gun types until much later in our history. Early local laws did control concealed weapons, though concealed cannons were not part of those ordinances. Indeed, the Constitution itself supports private cannon ownership in the case of privateers. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 allows Congress to ‘grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal.’ That allowed private parties to privateer on the high seas with … cannons.” —constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley)

And Last…

“People demanding ‘common sense’ gun laws fail to realize the people they think will obey those laws don’t use common sense. Besides, a society that believes 2+2=5 and that can no longer define what a woman is, may want to find something other than ‘common sense’ to make its case.” —Darrell B. Harrison