Today in Disgusting People

Take your pick:

Donald Trump:



With thanks to commenter fuzzybits at Joe.My.God.

That post quotes from this article about our second candidate, Greg Gutfeld:

“Society is changing. You have to teach them how to respond,” he said, before referring to kids as “soft targets.”

“You have to be rational about it, which means hardening soft targets through drills and training,” he said. “Learning combat. Learning hand-to-hand combat. This works, by the way, for terror, if there’s a terror attack, and it works for school shootings.”

Gutfeld asked “How do you improve upon this rationally? Well, you train them. That simple.”

What an absolutely insane idea. Can you see a first-grader aiming a karate punch and some guy with an assault rifle? In this context, I think "You have to be rational about it" makes a good laugh line.

Next up is Kentucky Governor Matt Blevin:

In the wake of a shooting that left at least 17 dead on Wednesday in a high school outside Boca Raton, Florida, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) focused on violent video games as part of a "culture of death that is being celebrated" and leading to these kinds of incidents.

"There are video games that, yes, are listed for mature audiences, but kids play them and everybody knows it, and there's nothing to prevent the child from playing them," Bevin said in an interview on WHAS' Leland Conway show Thursday morning. "They celebrate the slaughtering of people. There are games that literally replicate and give people the ability to score points for doing the very same thing that these students are doing inside of schools, where you get extra points for finishing someone off who's lying there begging for their life."

"These are quote-unquote video games, and they're forced down our throats under the guise of protected speech," Conway continued, seemingly referring to a 2011 Supreme Court decision that prevents content-based restrictions on games. "It's garbage. It's the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency. We're reaping what we've sown here."

That's just the tip of the iceberg. But he's not alone -- he's just the one who popped up in my surfing this morning. As it happens, the link between video games and violence is somewhat tenuous:

International comparisons of per capita spending on violent games and gun-related murders show a negative correlation between the two. And meta-analyses of video game violence studies have found no real link between imaginary on-screen violence and actual aggressive behavior.

Again, via Joe.My.God.

And last (for the time being) but certainly not least, the ever reprehensible Bryan Fischer:

I know a man who was living in a neighborhood when a salesman came door to door selling home security systems. He told the salesman he already had one. “What’s your security system?” he asked. The man replied, “God and a loaded gun.”

It wasn’t a matter of either/or but both/and. I suggest we have mass school shootings because we don’t have enough God on our campuses and we don’t have enough guns.

When tragic school shootings happen, like the one in Florida, everyone sends their “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. But why don’t we pray before these shootings happen instead of waiting until somebody’s dead? Everyone understands that prayer in school is appropriate in the wake of a tragedy like this. But if it’s appropriate after, there’s no reason it’s not appropriate before.

As might be expected, he turns it into an argument in favor of prayer in schools -- and more guns.

And, yes, via Joe.My.God.

The appalling thing is, this is all from three of the first four posts I saw at the first site I visited this morning. I'm sure there are more, but enough is enough. For right now, at least.