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MASS SHOOTING - Shortly after a 14-year-old mass shooter killed two teachers and two children and injured nine more victims at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) issued a statement saying that people should be praying for the victims and their families. The father of a child killed in a school shooting criticized her reaction. Greene is well-known for her love of guns, history of harassing school shooting survivors, and accusations that school shootings are fake.
Yesterday, Greene wrote on X, “Let us join together in prayer for the victims of the school shooting at Apalachee High School and their families just as these students of AHS circled together in prayer today.” Numerous Republican politicians expressed similar messages calling for prayer.
However, Manuel Oliver, the father of a child slain during the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, criticized their reaction, telling Scripps News, “Shame on anyone that is praying today instead of reacting.”
Oliver, an anti-gun violence activist, said, “I’m just listening to the quotes from members of Congress, and they’re praying?” he said. Then, referencing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), Oliver added, “You have a governor in that place that is asking us to pray, to join his family and pray…. That is not enough, and that is not working.”
Oliver then predicted that pro-gun politicians would start recommending putting metal detectors and armed teachers in schools to make them “more secure.”
Greene describes herself as “100% Pro-Life Pro-Gun Pro-Trump” in her bio on X. In a 2018 Facebook post, she claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas shooting were both “false flag operations.”
“I am told that [then-Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control,'” Greene wrote, furthering a common right-wing conspiracy theory that has inspired harassment and death threats against the families of school shooting victims.
In 2019, Greene filmed herself harassing gun safety activist and Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg. She has called Hogg “#littleHitler,” an “idiot” who is trained “like a dog,” a “coward,” and baselessly claimed Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros funds him.
Greene has also shot guns in several of her own campaign ads and social media posts.
(Daniel Villarreal is a longtime journalist, webmaster of DanielVillarrealWrites.com and an educator who has written for Queerty, The Seattle Stranger, Vox, Slate and many other publications.)
