NPR has an article on the Nashville school shooting earlier this week, in which former student Audrey Hale, 28, who identifies as male, killed three adults and three 9-year-olds. It's entitled “4 Big Questions about the Nashville School Shooting,” and those big questions are:

• What was the shooter's motive? (Seemed to be targeting the school but no individual within it)
• Could police have confiscated the suspect's guns? (Not in Tennessee. Because Tennessee.)
• Is it a hate crime? (The Josh Hawley trope. The school is Christian, so it's a way of deflecting from the discussion about “access to weaponry.” Which feels like the more important discussion.)
• Will lawmakers pass gun control measure? (Spare me)

Classically NPR, all of their questions are within the parameters of what the NRA and GOP make permissible. There's no thought outside that.

Which is why they leave out the real question. I call it the Jon Stewart question. 

Earlier this month, for his Apple TV+ show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” he interviewed Oklahoma state senator Nathan Daum, a Second Amendment absolutist, about gun matters. And Stewart went right to the heart of a longstanding NRA/GOP talking point. Whenever a mass shooting occurs, these guys say the problem isn't guns; it's too few guns. More guns were needed to keep us safe. It's the good-guy-with-a-gun thing. Some thinktank asshole thought that BS up, and the GOP's been running with it ever since. 

Stewart addressed it early. He looked at Sen. Daum and said this: 

“You're saying more guns make us more safe. So ... when?”

It's the best argument I've heard on the topic. And the whole 8-9 minute interview is fantastic: reasonable while still being very, very angry. It puts the onus on them, which is where it belongs. It's remind them that we create order out of chaos everywhere else, so why are we're not doing it here. It reminds them that for the most fundamental right in an American democracy, the right to vote, you still have to register. And they don't want that done for owning a killing machine?

That should be the slogan anytime we get a mass shooting. When? Anytime anyone in the NRA or GOP opens their piehole on the topic. When? Everytime more children are killed. When? You say we're getting safer. That doesn't seem to be the case. So ... when?