Greg Abbott blathers vapid word salad in response to latest Texas massacre

Republican governors have a familiar routine whenever there’s a mass shooting somewhere inside their state’s borders. They typically offer their “prayers,” heap praise on the police for doing their jobs, and then blame mental illness for the tragedy. The purpose of this is threefold: to pretend for a moment that they actually care; to push off the issue until it’s swallowed up—as it always is—by the next news cycle; and most importantly, to divert any focus from the gun manufacturers that fund their campaigns. Then they go home and forget about it—or, in the case of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, dream up new, pointless stunts at the border to rile up their voting base.

Abbott, like nearly all Republicans faced with the issue of mass carnage wrought by automatic and semi-automatic weapons in their home states, prefers to get this tiresome task behind him as painlessly as possible. Interviewed on Sunday by softball-friendly Fox News, Abbott’s prepared word salad in response to Saturday’s mass shooting in Allen, Texas, proved to be in fine form.

RELATED STORY: Investigators examine neo-Nazi ideology gunman who murdered eight in Dallas