Yesterday, the nation was once again rocked by another mass shooting, the 212th such event in the United States in just 144 days this year. As the nation reels from the sensation that mass gun violence is now a daily ritual of American life — the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, was just 10 days ago — Fox News has once again consulted its well-worn mass shooting playbook, which calls for blaming everything but the guns.
On Monday, a gunman stormed into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, shooting and killing at least 19 children and two adults before being killed by law enforcement. Reports indicate he also shot his grandmother before attacking the school.
At Fox News, the network fell back into the approach it’s deployed for nearly a decade since the December 2012 murders of 26 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut: deflecting blame from lax gun restrictions. In the hours following the Uvalde shooting, Fox hosts and guests called for an increase in the number of armed individuals in schools, demanded “accountability” for those responsible for security at Robb Elementary, and blamed a supposed lack of “discipline” at American schools for the recurrence of mass shootings.
Here is a sample of the things they blamed for continued gun violence:
