Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, back in late January, hosted a prayer rally on the LSU campus. There was a considerable amount of scrutiny on the event, entitled “The Response: A Call To Prayer For a Nation In Crisis,” due to the anti-gay, anti-abortion dominion theologians who organized and paid for it. The event’s leaders insisted that it wasn’t about elevating elected officials or candidates. Jindal, in inviting the 49 other governors to the event, bought into the organizers’ “non-political” framework. In the letter he wrote to every one of them, even those who aren’t Christian: “There will only be one name lifted up that day—Jesus!”

This was false. “The Response” was, at the time, both a political and evangelical platform for Jindal, now a presidential candidate who has often blurred the line between church and state with his policies and public pronouncements—and that’s being kind, considering that he introduced the pseudoscience of creationism into Louisiana schools. The January prayer rally also allowed Jindal to align himself with evangelicals and activists with big followings—men like Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, which reportedly paid for “The Response”—and who, presumably, will help Jindal appeal to the staunchly conservative base he’ll need to show up for him in the upcoming Republican presidential primaries. “Prayer is also a pious way to articulate their campaign strategies and beliefs about how government should run, since praying in this matter shows that they really want to put God above government to begin with,” said Anthea Butler, a religious studies professor and graduate chair at the University of Pennsylvania.

On Thursday night, a gunman in his late fifties named John Russell Houser waited for 20 minutes inside a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater auditorium before opening fire upon the crowd. Two women, Mayci Breaux and Jillian Johnson, were killed. Several others were wounded, some critically. The gunman, described as a “drifter” by Lafayette’s police chief, later shot himself to death. According to the Associated Press, he’d obtained his weapon legally at a pawnshop in Phenix City, Alabama, last year—something that probably should never have happened. Also in that report? Per court records, the future murderer exhibited “erratic behavior and threats of violence” that led to a brief involuntary hospitalization in 2008 and a restraining order preventing him from approaching family members.

The Lafayette shooting evoked the one in a Aurora, Colorado, movie theater that killed twelve and injured 70, missing its third anniversary by a mere three days. Since the Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 children and six adults later in 2012, there have been more than six dozen mass shootings in the United States, according to the Stanford Geospatial Center—including the recent murders in Charleston and Chattanooga. Add Lafayette to the list.

Jindal, who is known for his pro-gun views, tweeted a call for prayers for those at the theater and their families. He later gave an interview with KLFY-TV that was carried nationally. “The best thing we can do across Lafayette, across Louisiana, across our country,” he said, “is come together in thoughts, in love, in prayer.” I beg to differ.