I’m sorry, America, but we seem to be getting dumber by the nanosecond.

Yesterday in Parkland, Florida, wasn’t the first, second, fifth, tenth, or even twelfth school shooting in the first two months of this year. In terms of mass shootings, whether on a campus or not, it was nearly the 30th such event. To any even remotely casual observer it would appear these two facts would at the very least indicate the United States of America has a public health crisis brewing, and that guns are the underlying root. You don’t have to think guns kill people all by themselves to understand they are by design deadly implements that can and should be treated with more care than they are now.

But ask a lot of pro-gun Republicans, including Donny Dotard, and you’re going to mostly get empty platitudes about thoughts and prayers. But you might also get an even more disgustingly stupid response from them. You might just hear them condescend to you about how it all boils down to mental health problems.

What a laughably stupid, and self-evidently wrong conclusion to make, that guns aren’t the issue, only mental health is. To be clear, I am not saying that the assholes who inflict mass death like in Parkland, Columbine, Newtown, and elsewhere, aren’t mentally ill. They very likely and usually are. But the thing is, and I know I’m now the umpeenth person to say this, other countries have mentally ill people.

Other countries have people in them that are mentally unstable, and prone to acts of violence. Other countries have people who struggle with depression, suicide, and rage. And you know what? They don’t have the mass shootings we do. The common denominator is mental illness, but the uncommon one is GUNS. Access to guns, to be more specific. It’s absolutely galling to the point that it’s almost hilarious to hear Orange Fanta Fuckwit tell us he’s going to focus on mental health issues in the wake of Parkland, when one of his first acts as president was to make it easier for mentally unstable people to get guns. But it’s truly appalling when you consider that what he’s really doing is deciding to denigrate and demagogue people with mental health problems in order to facilitate his cynical, blood mongering party’s complete abdication of responsibility to legislate and govern with integrity.

There are millions of people in this country that suffer from one mental illness or another. Every day, those mentally ill people somehow manage to get through the day without killing someone with a gun. That right there should end the bullshit excuses about mental illness being more important to tackle than guns. But it doesn’t.

In the time it’s taken to for me to write this, it has been confirmed that the Parkland shooter was trained by a white nationalist group. This makes the second or third such attack in recent times. Dylann Roof was a white nationalist who shot up a black church, and now a white supremacist has shot up a high school over a teenage lovers spat. If you ask me, racist fucks are more a threat to my kids in school than mentally ill people are.

So you know, I’d even accept, in lieu of gun regulation, the FBI went after the group, and every group like it, that trained and armed this bastard. If Jeff Sessions would commit to breaking up the white nationalist groups like he’s committed to keeping our failed war on marijuana going, then at least I could sleep a little better knowing we were undertaking some kind of effort to curb mass shootings, specifically at schools.

I won’t hold my breath though. A little over five years ago, the nation watched more than 20 first graders be taken out of Sandy Hook Elementary in body bags, Congress did nothing, and most of those assholes who voted down universal background checks are still in office.

You know what? Maybe it is a mental illness issue, after all. I mean, it takes some level of mental illness to consider dead kids a reasonable price for “freedom” and “liberty,” right?

It’s the height of stupidity blame our rampant mass shooting problem on mental health issues alone. Then again, 62 million people in this country genuinely thought a selfish, trust fund racist and D-List Reality TV star would make a good president. So…

…what a piece of shit country we live in sometimes.