There really is no other way to phrase it, the response from the Right to the Charleston church shooting has been...well it's been disgusting.

So here we are on the third day after this horrific shooting and both sides of the political spectrum are firmly entrenched in their positions.

On the Left there are calls for more gun control and a serious discussion about racism in this country, and on the Right there are calls for arming pastors, and an aggressive attempt to deflect any blame for the violence from one who is clearly on their side of the ideological fence.

Here are some responses from those Republicans who claim to want to lead this country.

Chris Christie: 

“Laws can’t change this.” 

“This type of conduct is something that only our display of our own love and good faith that’s in our heart can change,” he said.

That of course it completely untrue.  As can be proven by looking at the example set by Australia.

Jeb Bush (Same article):  

“But I do know what was in the heart of the victims,” Bush said. “They were meeting in brotherhood and sisterhood in that church. … They were praying. They were learning and studying the word of the Lord, to find grace in his kingdom, to fill his house with love.”

Actually we DO know what was in the shooter's heart. Hatred for black people:  

"You all rape women and you're taking over our country."

Not only that but like all sociopaths it appears he has written a manifesto, which comes complete with pictures, angry rants, and tons of racism:

Couldn't be much clearer than that.

Here is what Mike Huckabee, a Christian pastor himself, had to say: 

“All the proposals this president and others have put forward on gun control would not have stopped this shooting anymore than it would have stopped Sandy Hook,” Huckabee said. “The one thing that would have at least ameliorated the horrible situation in Charleston would have been that if somebody in that prayer meeting had a conceal carry or there had been either an off duty policeman or an on duty policemen, somebody with the legal authority to carry a firearm and could have stopped the shooter.”

In other words we can do nothing to keep ourselves safe except prepare ourselves to return gunfire if fired upon. 

Which unsurprisingly is essentially the opinion of Charles Cotton, a board member for the NRA: 

Cotton, who did not return a message left at his Houston-area law firm, pointed out on a Texas gun forum that Pinckney was a state senator who had voted against a law allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons without permits. 

“Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead,” Cotton wrote. “Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

So apparently these people deserved to die because they were not  prepared to take a life in a place where they felt safe and were learning about love and compassion. Good to know.

No in the Right Wing bubble all gun violence is the result of mental illness, ill prepared victims, or radical Islamist terrorists from who the President is failing to protecting us.

However about that mental illness thing:  

We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

(As somebody who works with the mentally ill, I can concur that most of what we do is to protect them from others, not protect others from them.)

Personally I think that this recent Rolling Stone article really hit the nail on the head:

The fact is, this is political because American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings political. The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible. We can't afford to allow political discussions of these events, because if we do, we might notice what's already there, wracking the body politic like gangrene. 

Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically "legitimizes" an armed insurrection against the government created by it. Those leading said insurrection are swaddled by the blanket exculpation of patriotism. At the same time, they have synonymized the Democratic Party with illegitimacy and abuse of the American order. This is no longer an argument about whether one party's beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation. Leftism no longer constitutes a debatable misuse of American power, but theft and governmental overreach. 

In other words as the Right Wing sees their power diminishing as a more diverse population begins to outnumber their base, they start to talk about "protecting our rights," "2nd Amendment solutions," and "retaking our country," and ALL of that is the kind of rhetoric that leads to people being shot to death in their own house of worship.

What could have been done to protect these nine people in South Carolina?

Well making it much, much harder to get a gun would be a nice start, but also making people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sarah Palin shut the fuck up would certainly make a vast difference as well.

Which of course is why Bill O'Reilly became so defensive when a guest made a similar point: 

“You’re equating what Dylann Roof did in that church to our commentary?” he asked. “Are you saying that Fox News justifies brutal crimes against black Americans?”

Yes, yes I am.