And the GOP will continue the race to the bottom by complaining about the overheated rhetoric contributing to the shooting.

Anything to deflect attention away from the fact that the guy probably shouldn’t have had access to guns at all. Or that the easy availability of firearms creates conditions such as this, or the ongoing mass shootings that happen like clockwork (hours after the Virginia shooting, there was a mass shooting at a UPS facility in San Francisco).

But for the easy availability of guns, mass shootings would occur much more infrequently. But for the lax gun laws in many parts of the country, shootings would be much lower than it is.

As it stands, states with stronger gun laws have a much lower per capita homicide by gun rate than those having lax gun laws.

Virginia’s per capita homicide rate is more than twice that of New York. New York, despite having a much larger population, had fewer homicides by firearms than Virginia in 2015.

Of course, we have Rand Paul and Trump himself musing about 2d Amendment solutions, but will now watch as GOPers deflect and defend both statements while claiming it was Democrats who were pouring gasoline on the political environment.