"Stuff happens," said Jeb Bush Friday, in response to this week's shooting at an Oregon community college that left nine deceased victims and 10 injured.
Speaking at a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, the Republican presidential candidate said, "Look, stuff happens. There's always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something, and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."
Asked by a reporter if he stood by his choice of words, Bush doubled down, saying, "No, it wasn't a mistake. I said exactly what I said. Why would you explain to me what I said wrong?"
Thanks for doubling down on the insensitivity there Jeb! I guess that is just in case we didn't already know you were a dick.
Apparently Donald Trump had a similarly dismissive attitude:
"You're going to have these things happen and it's a horrible thing to behold, horrible," Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"It's not politically correct to say that, but you're going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there's going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks," Trump added. "What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?"
Yeah people are going to slip through the cracks, and you can't institutionalize everybody, so why do anything?
Now compare that with our President's passionate call for us to address this crisis of mass shootings, and to take steps to minimize or prevent them altogether.
Also compare it to Hillary Clinton's response:
"I have to tell you, Janet, I am just sick of this," Clinton told Janet Wu of the Boston ABC affiliate WCVB Thursday evening. "I'm sick about it, and I feel an absolute urgency for this country to start being sensible about keeping guns away from people who should not have them."
"I think that what we need is a national movement," she continued. "What the NRA does in their single-minded, absolutist theology about the Second Amendment being sacrosanct -- when we know that every constitutional right and amendment can be tailored in an appropriate way without breaching the Constitution -- but what they do is to so intimidate and scare legislators because they make it into a single issue for voting."
"I'm going to try to do everything I can as president to raise up an equally large and vocal group that is going to prove to be a counterbalance," she said. "And we're going to tell legislators, do not be afraid. Stand up to these people because a majority of the population and a majority of gun owners agree that there should be universal background checks. And the NRA has stood in the way."
As if we needed another reason to turn out in 2016 to keep the Republicans out of the White House.
New reports on the shooter reveal that the shooter was a mentally ill, white supremacist who was equipped with a flak jacket, was carrying six different firearms, and seems to have targeted Christians.
Of course his motivations, or his mental state, are only peripherally important as the main reason these shootings occurred is because of how easy it is to access guns in this country.
Until we seriously address that issue, this nightmare will never end.
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