While smartphones—which are inanimate objects with no moral agency, just like, erm, guns—can certainly lead to criminality, saying they’re a clear and present danger to society may be a bit of a stretch. The one exception is if you’ve given Matt Gaetz your Venmo username and account info. And no, those aren’t NFTs he’s sending you. They’re NSFWs. Seriously, though, can you imagine what’s on that guy’s phone? Answer: Every bodily fluid known to modern science. And what’s in it is arguably worse. By the way, I heard Matt Gaetz was gonna buy his girlfriend an engagement ring with Apple Pay but he was worried she’d just grow out of it in six months, so …
Anyhoo, enough about that loser. This story is about a completely different loser—one with aggressively weird ideas about how the world works.
So far, Republicans have blamed everything under the sun for the recent rash of mass shootings in this country: video games, weed, an absence of the very same mental health services they keep cutting, too many doors, too few “good guys” with guns, etc. But dang it if that list doesn’t look incomplete.
Enter Texas Rep. Pat Fallon, who is certain he’s finally cracked the case:
FALLON: “The truth is that guns have always been readily available in this country, but mass shootings, and particularly mass shootings in schools, were nonexistent or at least were extremely rare until they became a grisly recent phenomenon. So what’s changed in the last 50 years? There’s been a noticeable breakdown of the family, there’s been an erosion of faith, and there’s been a seismic drop in social interaction in large measure due to the overuse of these dang smartphones and the proliferation of social media, which is probably better described as anti-social media. Senseless mass shootings are not committed by well-adjusted, successful, socially polished people. ...”
To be fair, Rep. Fallon appears to have more on the ball than, say, his Texas colleague Louie Gohmert. But that’s not saying much. You could probably get Gohmert to play quietly in his office for at least an hour by giving him a copy of The Last Supper and telling him to find Waldo. Nevertheless, it appears that the esteemed gentleman from Texas (Fallon, not Gohmert) is gormlessly grasping at straws here.
Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to turn me into a satanic ritual murderer, and that never happened. The nuns in my grade school told me that obsessively doin’ the Giuliani would eventually make me go blind, but I still have nearly 20% vision in one eye.
Should kids go outside and play more often? I don’t know. Isn’t that where all the child kidnappers and marauding bears are? Is Fallon arguing that we should enact federal laws to protect children from the potential pitfalls of the internet? Oh, wait, we already did that. And yet, for some reason, 18-year-olds in most states can still amble into a gun shop and buy an assault rifle.
Also, Rep. Fallon should really do a better job of lining up his supposed causes with their putative effects. Faith has been eroding for decades, even as overall violent crime rates have plummeted. And conservatives have been tut-tutting about family breakdown for as long as anyone can remember.
But we still have all these mass shootings. And by “we,” I mean the United States—the only country in the world with divorces and smartphones, apparently.
Ah, but Fallon isn’t really this naive. What he’s doing here is giving his “the world is falling apart because of those durn liberals” spiel and hoping it will satisfy his constituents until the price of gas goes up another 2 cents and everyone loses focus again.
I’d like to say he’s wasting his time, but who are we kidding? Fallon speaks fluent conservative, and as long as he’s besmirching liberal soy-boy cucks like yours truly, his followers are apt to believe just about anything.
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