Mike Johnson’s magic formula for reducing mass shootings

Your latest reminder that while Mike Johnson may not buy his suits at Wal-Mart and was able to pass the bar exam, he’s no less of a hateful crackpot than Gym Jordan:

What is it about Representative Mike Johnson that ended Republicans’ spasms of disunity, electing him Speaker of the House on Wednesday? The initial response was befuddlement, a collective who? Senator Susan Collins said she was going to have to Google him. And maybe that’s the point. Mike Johnson, man without enemies, Trump endorsee. Mike Johnson, low-key and sincere dude, a Ned Flanders type who, it has resurfaced, also was a primary architect of the election insurrection. Mike Johnson, a soldier of the Christian legal movement, the guy I drove to Bossier City, Louisiana, in August 2015 to talk with about what he believed.

At the time, Johnson was a lawyer defending Louisiana’s abortion restrictions — purported safety regulations designed to shut down clinics — in court and had just been elected, unopposed, to the State House of Representatives. I remember thinking how anodyne the office was, like a small-town personal-injury firm, as he cheerfully told me that soon the pro-lifers would outnumber the pro-choicers who aborted all their babies. I no longer have a recording, just a 27-page transcript, but my memory is that he kept his voice smooth and pleasant as he said, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”

I would assume that Louisiana must have much lower homicide rates than New York or Massachusetts or Washington given that abortion has long been less accessible there. I do not feel the need to do any research to back up this obvious truth.

Johnson is also a raging bigot who thinks that consensual sex between same-sex partners should be criminalized:

But prior to joining Congress in 2017, he spent years building his career and profile by denouncing gay people and fighting against gay rights, which he staunchly opposes, citing his Christian faith and views on liberty.

An ABC News examination of public records, news reports and documents shows the extent to which Johnson dedicated earlier phases of his career to limiting gay rights, including same-sex marriage and health care access, and through anti-gay activism on college campuses.

In comments from over fifteen years ago, long before he became a lawmaker and while acting as an attorney and spokesman for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Christian advocacy group, Johnson described homosexuals as “sinful” and “destructive” and argued support for homosexuality could lead to support for pedophilia. He also authored op-eds that argued for criminalizing gay sex.

“There is clearly no ‘right to sodomy’ in the Constitution,” Johnson wrote in a 2003 column in a Louisiana newspaper. “And the right of ‘privacy of the home’ has never placed all activity with the home outside the bounds of the criminal law.”

The idea that same-sex marriage is a settled issue and Obergefell is safe is exactly as misguided and naive as believing that a Republican Supreme Court would never overrule Roe, and AFICT the pundits who believed the latter haven’t learned anything from the experience.