Rep. Pat Fallon Blames Mass Shootings On 'Dang Smartphones'

David Moye
·2 min read
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Although guns are, by definition, a part of every single mass shooting, many Republican politicians twist themselves into knots trying to blame them on something, anything other than firearms.

On Wednesday, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) came up with yet another cause of gun violence that doesn’t actually involve guns.

If you’re reading this on your phone, you might want to sit down — because he’s blaming smartphones.

During a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Wednesday, Fallon rejected a call for new gun regulations by suggesting guns were around long before the relatively recent rash of mass shootings began.

“Guns have always been readily available in this country but mass shootings and particularly mass shootings of schools were nonexistent or extremely rare until they became a grisly recent phenomenon,” Fallon told the committee.

“So what’s changed in the last 50 years?” he asked, before offering his own theory.

“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,” he said while holding up his own device as a visual aid.

As mentioned above, Fallon isn’t the only person offering suggestions for reducing gun violence that don’t involve curbing guns ― especially in the wake of last month’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Herschel Walker, a GOP U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia, had a head-scratching suggestion for preventing future massacres.

“What about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that looking at social media,” he said.

In addition, the supercut video below shows Fox News personalities offering 50 suggestions for curbing gun violence that don’t involve guns but do include improved fencing and decreased phone usage.

H/T RawStory

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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