Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

The horrific mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, yesterday has once again touched off a discussion about what can be done to stop the escalating series of bloody massacres that only happen with this regularity in our country. The preordained answer, of course, is nothing. The Republican Party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, and its commitment to the National Rifle Association’s maximalist position on gun rights cannot be shaken -- not by dead schoolchildren, not by the fact that two members of Congress have been gunned down in the last decade, not by anything.

Opposition to strengthening gun laws emanates from the GOP, which has collectively made the political calculation that shot-up schools and ever-increasing body counts are an acceptable alternative to angering the gun lobby and pro-gun activists within its own base. This is not an exotic political argument: it’s a plain, uncontroversial truth that anyone who’s paid a moment’s attention to the politics of gun regulation can attest to.

And yet, in this morning’s First Read newsletter by NBC News, blame for the sclerotic toxicity of this situation was laid at the feet of “Washington,” which, the authors argue, is “fundamentally broken.” Here’s how the authors described the state of gun politics:

And what has Washington done to respond to this mass violence? Absolutely nothing. America’s political system has been incapable of coming up with ANY federal public policy to address mass shootings. In 2013, after the Newtown shooting, the U.S. Senate blocked a measure to require background checks for gun purchases. In 2017, after Las Vegas, Congress talked about banning bump stocks – accessories that makes rifles fire more rapidly – but ultimately did nothing.

As I noted on Twitter, this paragraph (and the rest of the piece) goes well out of its way to avoid placing blame for the dysfunction where it belongs: on the GOP. By framing the issue as one of “Washington” gridlock, NBC News is actually doing the real culprits a favor by obscuring the ghastly political game the GOP plays to maintain its grip on power while allowing more and more Americans to be cut down by bullets fired from legally obtained military-style weaponry. Calling this a “Washington” problem is horrendously misleading and needlessly seeks to remove partisanship from what is an absolutely partisan issue.

One of First Read’s authors, NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray, responded to my tweet and, in the process, accidentally helped underscore just how awful the piece’s framing is:

Just asking, but you want us to ignore that 4 Dem senators voted against background checks in 2013, while 4 GOP senator voted for it?

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) February 15, 2018

First of all, the vote tally on the 2013 background check filibuster wasn’t mentioned in his piece, so they did ignore it. Had they included that vote tally, it would have undermined their lazy framing. Yes, four Democratic senators voted against background checks in 2013 (as did then-majority leader Harry Reid, who supported the bill but voted no for procedural reasons). But those four Democratic senators stood alongside forty-one Republicans who voted down the measure. So the filibuster would have been sustained regardless of how those Democrats voted, which demonstrates that meaningful gun safety legislation is impossible to pass at the federal level so long as Republicans maintain any measure of control.

That gets us back to the original, uncontroversial point: Republicans are the problem when it comes to legislation addressing mass shootings. There is no reason to avoid stating it plainly.