Republicans have pinpointed the real villain in the Uvalde shooting: Doors

Yesterday I recommended that murder-abetting conservative ghouls find a new soundbite to replace their tried and true and thoroughly debunked cliche of “a good guy with a gun.” Today, just 48 hours after a gunman shot and killed 19 children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, it seems that Republican lawmakers and opinion shapers have heeded my advice by rapidly coalescing around a new trope: The Uvalde massacre could have been easily prevented, if not for the dastardly interference of doors.

Yes. Doors.

Here’s Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, ranting about the dangerous proliferation of unregulated doorways, outside of Robb Elementary on Wednesday evening:

Cruz further honed his message later that evening with an only slightly less unhinged appearance on (where else?) Fox News — rapidly becoming the nation’s No. 1 anti-door cable news network.

Later that night, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick joined the growing cult of Conservative Door Denialism with his own Fox News spotlight-grab:

The Unidoor Movement even extends to Ohio, where GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance cautioned people against “grasp[ing] for easy solutions” before saying what schools really need is fewer doors.

Doors! Those dastardly devilish doors! America doesn’t have a gun problem, it has a door problem! What we need to do is turn every single elementary, middle, and high school into a single-entrance Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. This is how lives will be saved — by creating an untenable bottleneck entrance which, if breached by a gunman with assault-style weapons, will become an impenetrable position from which an attacker could repel a police siege. These geniuses! They’ve figured it all out!

If anything, all this conservative hand-wringing over doors is a good thing — it’s a sign of just how pathetically shallow the GOP’s attempt to obfuscate from the obvious need for gun control has become. This is the best they can offer? Doors? Wonder what they’ll say next time.