It was a matter of time. The playbook after a mass shooting for gun manufacturers' allies in Congress—that is, the Republican Party—is first to say it's "too soon." Then, if people persist, it's to say that no gun law could stop gun violence and that this is really about mental health. Better mental health treatment is most certainly a piece of the puzzle in preventing mass murder with guns, but listening to Republicans, you'd think it was the whole ballgame. Enter Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House:

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“Mental health reform is a critical ingredient to making sure we can try and prevent these things from happening," Speaker Ryan says pic.twitter.com/Fm5srPF5Xm — CBS News (@CBSNews) October 3, 2017

It's true that the House did pass a mental health bill last year, one which, according to NBC News, advocates called "a solid first step" towards a more humane system but still "the tip of the iceberg." The bill sought to provide more hospital beds for people suffering short-term mental illness issues, and changed some of the rules around how parents could access information about their children's mental health after they turned 18. Considering that 57.8 percent of mentally ill Americans got no care in 2012, NBC tells us, more resources and rule tweaks were an improvement.

However, some advocates cautioned that it did not focus on getting treatment to the most serious cases, "who are most likely to become homeless, arrested, incarcerated, suicidal, violent, etcetera," according to Executive Director of Mental Illness Policy Org DJ Jaffe. Mental Health America’s CEO Paul Gionfriddo was more explicit in a statement to NBC:

“But the truth is, the reason to do mental health reform is to reform the mental health system and to help people with a set of serious illnesses to recover and be healthy and to thrive,” he said. “If you’re doing it for the reason that you think violence in America is going to disappear ... or even mass violence in America is going to disappear, you’re just going to be disappointed.”

Still, it was a step in the right direction. And it lasted most of a year, until it came time for the Republican Party to complete their years-long piece of performance art, Repeal and Replace Obamacare. Every bill the Republicans came up with savaged funding to Medicaid, the single largest provider of mental health services in America. That began with Ryan's American Health Care Act in the House of Representatives, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would cut $834 billion from Medicaid through 2026.

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Both Ryan's bill and many of the monstrosities to emerge half-formed from the Senate allowed states to apply for waivers to get exemptions for insurance companies from providing Essential Health Benefits. Under Obamacare, this is a term for services like emergency room visits, pregnancy, and yes, mental health. That means if you lived in a state whose local lawmakers were friendly enough with insurance companies—hint: you probably would—your insurance plan very well could have had no coverage for mental health, or had jacked up premiums or deductibles.

All this is to say that, even on the red herring issue of mental health treatment, Paul Ryan and his Republican friends hardly have a leg to stand on. And that's not even to get to the real issue: preventing criminals and the mentally ill from getting their hands on weapons of war capable of wreaking mass destruction in a matter of minutes. The president provided a succinct look at their attitude on that issue in an appearance Wednesday:

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President Trump when asked about gun control: "We're not going to talk about that today." pic.twitter.com/xS1UqLA8bJ — NBC News (@NBCNews) October 4, 2017

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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