Like all too many of her far-right colleagues, Congresswoman and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a firearm fanatic. She began her 2020 congressional campaign by cocking an assault rifle and warning "antifa" to "stay the hell out of Northwest Georgia." She's cited the Second Amendment as a potential justification for killing prominent Democrats and volunteers going door-to-door with information about the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines.
On Tuesday in Brooklyn, a gunman donning a gas mask released a smoke bomb inside a New York City subway car and opened fire, shooting at least 10 people. When the doors opened, terrified commuters raced from the smoke filled car to flee the attack. The gunman is still at large.
Without a moment's hesitation, Greene posted a tweet from her congressional Twitter account (her personal account was banned earlier this year for disinformation), accusing New York City's gun laws for allowing the chaos.
Greene suggested that if more innocent bystanders with guns were at the scene, the damage would've been minimized.
With New York’s strict gun control laws, how many innocent people were carrying a gun when the bad guy with a gun broke the existing laws and started shooting people?
Bad guys don’t care about gun control and gun control only stops people from being able to protect themselves.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) April 12, 2022
Let's examine this logic for a second.
If a gunman unleashed a cloud of blinding smoke and began opening fire, what would happen if three bystanders brandished their firearms? Would they shoot at one of their fellow bystanders? Would they be able to clearly identify their intended target? Would more bystanders get hurt?
Greene isn't known for her intellect, and her latest harebrained quip made it easy to see why.
There it is, the idiot Republican idea that it would have been *better* if one of the other passengers was armed and started blindly shooting into the fog of a smoke grenade on a crowded subway. https://t.co/SjR8aKdrMd
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) April 12, 2022
if only more people had started shooting guns in that crowded, smoke-filled subway car https://t.co/oZAaPPd4K5
— goblin modiste (@lyta_gold) April 12, 2022
just trying to imagine what a massive shootout on a smoke filled subway would've done to the body count. https://t.co/9kR1zpW8TE
— Mark Kawada (@Mark_Kawada) April 12, 2022
He threw smoke grenades into a packed subway car and opened fire. So with this logic, there would be multiple people shooting aimlessly into a cloud of smoke *hoping* they hit the right person. Seems like NYCs gun laws prevented this from becoming a mass casualty event. https://t.co/OKBZQ5wiCZ
— i love ranch dressing (@TieDyeBlotter) April 12, 2022
Marge thinks people on a packed rail car filled with smoke all should have started popping off rounds.
The Republican party worships at this idiot's feet. https://t.co/xIOnPr9ED4
— Eric Schmeltzer 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 (@JustSchmeltzer) April 12, 2022
Hey very stable genius what would you have wanted a lawfully armed citizen to do? Shoot blindly around a subway car filled with smoke from a smoke grenade? 🤦♂️🤦♂️ https://t.co/9CUSe09AOr
— David R. Thomas (@DavidRThomas3) April 12, 2022
Others cited historical shootings and their own personal experiences to explain why Greene was wrong.
When a gunman opened fire in an El Paso Walmart in 2019 and killed 23 people, several people in the shopping complex were carrying (because Texas has lax gun laws). None of them stopped him, and all of them needed to be stopped and cleared afterward, prolonging the investigation. https://t.co/MkgxGriGuu
— Jennifer Matarese (@trollprincess) April 12, 2022
If there is anything I learned when I was in the Secret Service it’s that multiple, untrained, armed individuals firing in a smoke-filled environment is a quality idea. https://t.co/hyCWqKH3iu
— J.J. Hensley (@JJHensleyauthor) April 12, 2022
I’m a gun owner. But this “good guy with a gun” argument is dumb as fuck. It doesn’t work unless the good guy has had a few thousand hours of training. Jamming a pistol in your pants doesn’t mean you have any chance of stopping something like this. https://t.co/0mpRD8YFdf
— bluesdad (@_photobug) April 12, 2022
Fortunately, as of the time of this writing, there were no reported fatalities.
@jaketapoer/Bluesky
@BillAckman/Twitter