Not The Smartest Monkeys

 Hold the phone, folks. The new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has an explanation for mass shootings in the United States. But before I share this valuable insight with all of you, I feel the need to let you all know that writing that previous sentence, I flinched when I wrote "Representatives" and "United States." Thank you, and now we return to our regularly scheduled paragraph. In a sermon from 2016, Speaker Mike said this: “And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

Well. This certainly is an eye-opener, especially as the news of the election of a new Speaker of the House comes just before another killing spree in which a man opened fire in a Lewiston, Maine bowling alley. Even as officials were tallying up the dead and the injured, the suspect fled, leaving a trail of his past behind, including his time in the military and his job as a firearms instructor. And his stay in a mental health facility just this past summer. 

Blame the teacher who suggested to this person that Charles Darwin was right. Keen observers might argue at this point that apes don't have any history of mass murder in their species, so maybe evolution plays no part in this equation. Or maybe the gun laws that prohibit the sale of automatic weapons to primates have been doing their job all these years, and we might ask if even the smartest apes should be allowed to carry around weapons used in war.

But let's return to the other thread, the one about the new Speaker of the House. It seems more likely that this pointy of the pointiest head will focus his lawmaking capacities on stuffing more church into a state that is supposed to separate the two. Evangelically motivated legislation will not include more efforts to limit the sale and availability of killing machines like the AR-15. It is much more likely that this nimrod will work to limit the teaching of evolution in schools. 

I am much more concerned about what Speaker Nimrod will do in the next year than I am about chimpanzees getting their hands on machine guns. Unless the chimps in question are born-again. As The Lawgiver taught us, "Ape shall never kill ape."