Bobby Jindal Blames Shooter’s Father and “Cultural Decay” for Oregon College Tragedy October 6, 2015

Bobby Jindal Blames Shooter’s Father and “Cultural Decay” for Oregon College Tragedy

Bobby Jindal is a joke of a politician. He’s run his state of Louisiana into the ground and continues a presidential campaign with less than one percent of GOP support on a platform that says immigrants need to assimilate better. He’s long been the discount store version of Mike Huckabee‘s fire and brimstone, so the idea of him Bible-thumping for attention is far from surprising.

In a post for the conversation website Red State, though, Jindal has sunk to new and deplorable lows.

He starts out predictably, booming about “cultural decay” and “rot.” He says our boys will “never become real men,” complains that video games are poisonous, laments how God is absent from the family, and claims gun control doesn’t matter. It’s the same old culture war routine he’s been delivering for a decade now.

But then he makes a sharp turn towards ugly. After pounding out his list of what really ails this country, he takes aim at the shooter’s father:

  • Now, let’s get really politically incorrect here and talk specifically about this horror in Oregon. This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns.
  • Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here.
  • He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology.
  • When he was asked what his relationship was with his son, he said he hadn’t seen him in a while because he lived with his mother. Case Closed.

That’s not politically incorrect. That’s heartless malice from a bitter politician grasping at the last shreds of his dignity.

Listen: The shooter was 26 years old and lived in a different state from his father. The idea that they hadn’t seen each other in a while is hardly controversial or even noteworthy. Travel’s hard. Money’s tight. Not everyone’s incredibly tight with their parents. None of those are reasons someone shoots up a school… unless you’re Bobby Jindal and you have political points to score.

The shooter’s parents divorced in 2006. Jindal knows nothing about their life pre-divorce, what the custody arrangement was afterwards, or what the relationship between father and son looked like at any point in time. Jindal’s entire argument is based on the disgusting idea that any family structure outside of the one he deems acceptable means the parents are failures. (Can you just imagine what he’d be saying if the shooter’s parents were gay?)

It doesn’t matter that many a mass shooter has come from a two parent home. It doesn’t matter that experts have said time and time again that families of perpetrators in these cases really should not be blamed. It doesn’t matter that there are so, so, so many other factors that played into the shooter’s motivations. It doesn’t matter that parents can never know everything there is to know about their children.

Nope. Jindal, whose oldest child is only 13, has it all figured out. Ian Mercer, the shooter’s father, was a failure. That’s it. Let’s not talk about guns. And, by the way, we need more God in society. That’ll solve everything.

(Image via Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com)

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