If there’s one thing the anti-gun left hates more (or at least as much) as our right to keep and bear arms, it’s the thoughts and prayers that are offered up after a high-profile shooting. It’s not uncommon to see social media posts like this one from Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in response to someone sharing their sympathies online. 

Fuck your prayers. They haven’t worked for the last 20 mass shootings how about passing laws that will stop these killings. https://t.co/Wz432YCMPe

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) May 24, 2022

Gallegos tweet in 2022 was par for the course. The “**** your prayers” line is almost always followed up with a vague call to action; a demand to pass gun control laws that will supposedly keep us safe from harm. And despite their complaints about the empty rhetoric of “thoughts and prayers”, folks like Gallego rarely offer up any specific policy proposals, which makes their rhetoric utterly meaningless. Such is the case with writer Diane Roberts’s column at the Tampa Bay Times. 

Nobody wants their feeble prayers and, as for their thoughts, if the violence-loving reactionaries in charge of this state were actually capable of thoughts they’d realize things do not have to be this way. 

From the state Capitol to the U.S. Capitol, politicians shrug: Guns matter more than people; children, high school students, college students — they don’t give the big money to political campaigns.

The Second Amendment trumps all the others.

We’re supposed to accept there’s nothing anyone can do: This is just the way things are.

As The Onion’s evergreen mass shooting headline goes, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

But the kids ain’t all right; the kids are scared — and furious.

Last Tuesday, a group of FSU students braved the morally noxious fumes of the Capitol to demand sensible gun control, red flag laws, firearm storage legislation — commonsense stuff like that.

Many of those “commosense” demands have already been met and are on the books in Florida, yet they didn’t stop the attack on the Florida State campus. Florida has a “red flag” law, a gun storage statute, a ban on gun sales to adults under the age of 21, and prohibits the lawful carrying of a concealed firearm on the campus of a public university. 

None of those measures did a damn thing to prevent a man with murder on his mind from opening fire, so what exactly does Diane Roberts believe would have been efffective at stopping someone who stole a gun and used it to target random strangers? 

She doesn’t say. In her column she rails against Republicans, Donald Trump, Second Amendment advocates, and other bogeymen, but she never actually gets around to offering up specific legislation that she believes would have stopped this attack from ever taking place. 

If this crime was preventable, it wasn’t going to be a gun control law that prevented it. The suspect couldn’t legally purchase a firearm or carry it on campus because of Florida’s existing gun laws. He apparently had some mental health issues and had allegedly stopped taking his medication, though, which should have been one red flag for family members. It’s unknown at this point if he ever communicated his plans to anyone else, and while some classmates have said that some of his comments and rhetoric were “concerning”, others say they never felt uncomfortable or threatened by him. 

The sad reality is that there is no way to stop every heinous crime from taking place, especially just by passing a particular gun control law. Even if the United States had decided to ban gun ownership completely decades ago, there would have been nothing stopping this twisted individual from getting behind the wheel of a car and running down students and staff instead. 

As much as Roberts complains about calls for thoughts and prayers, I’d say her vague and vacuous demand to “do something” is even worse. Faith and prayer do provide aid and comfort for at least some of us, but the empty rhetoric of the anti-gun crowd doesn’t make us any safer and provides no help at all in keeping us safe from harm.