Republican representative Thomas Massie decided to post a photo,
a nice little holiday photo over the weekend.
And the timing couldn't be worse.
Especially considering the fact that there was just a school shooting
that lead to four kids dying as a result of one of their classmates opening fire.
So here's what the photo looks like Thomas Massie tweets, merry Christmas, ps Santa.
Please bring ammo.
Every member of his family has a weapon on them and they all have big bright smiles.
What a great, lovely photo.
Now, of course, there was a lot of backlash to that image.
Especially from individuals who have actually lost family members as a result
of America's relaxed gun culture.
Fred Guttenberg whose 14 year old daughter,
Jamie was one of the 17 people gunned down in Parkland Florida.
Responded to Massey's tweet writing this,
since we're sharing family photos here are mine.
One is the last photo that I ever took of Jamie,
the other is where she is buried because of the Parkland school shooting.
The Michigan school shooter and his family used to take photos like yours as well.
And there was some backlash from other lawmakers as well,
including congressman John Yarmuth.
Who tweeted this, I promise not everyone in Kentucky is an insensitive a whole.
>> Yeah, Yarmuth is retiring democrat from Kentucky.
And actually one of the better congress people in the country and has been for
a couple of decades.
Massie is a lunatic right winger from Kentucky.
That's the difference.
So put the picture back up because yeah, people are making great points,
serious points.
Gutenberg's point is the most salient of course, and very touching.
I'm just gonna tell you what, I honestly think.
I think they look like a family of lunatics out of a horror movie.
I'm being completely serious.
That looks like what you would run into in a horror movie.
Like, am I safe?
And you you're running from the monster or whatever and the killer and
then you knock on the door and then this is what you see.
And then you scream even louder because it's not just one person with
a weapon that's scary.
It's the whole family who I don't and they have these deranged smiles
on their face like, hey, murder is about to happen any second now.
We have enough bullets here to kill a whole village.
Okay, you've come to the wrong house on Christmas.
But honestly, this is what's wrong with America.
We are so split that a lot of people look at that picture,
millions of people in America look at that picture and go atta boy.
>> Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
You don't find that photo appealing in any way.
Because you're not the demographic that's being targeted by that image, right?
The people that would find that appealing or
the very individuals who support representative Massie anyway, right?
And and they don't necessarily support Massie based on what he stands for
policy wise.
This is just more of the honestly easy pandering to cultural issues and
in this case it's the gun culture.
>> Yeah, and look what's next in the next Christmas photo album of the Massie's.
They're gonna have like RPGS, the fire shouldered rockets.
They're gonna have hand grenades.
So we pulled it after the picture, we're throwing it out the window or
maybe we're not, I don't know, weapons are awesome.
One of us has a finger on the nuke.
We're thinking of nuking the whole town.
Yay violence, murder and violence.
Yay, and so we live with these folks.
We live with millions and millions of these folks.
Look are there guns in other countries?
Well, the answer is for most countries barely, right?
But they exist in other countries.
But is there a culture in other countries where they celebrate death,
violence, guns, homicides, etc.
Yeah, but only a couple like Afghanistan.
The Taliban loved the weapons they love,
they would have a picture almost exactly like that, right?
Except they wouldn't give it to the women.
So to be fair, right, in this case, all the women murderous weapons.
To who do we murder, yeah, right?
You might find a couple like that in in other war torn countries and
other fundamentalist countries.
But I don't, there is no answer to this.
There is some massive percentage of our country that thinks
weapons of that are gonna, that are designed to kill people.
It's like the greatest thing in the world and they just substitute for
their penis and it's a substitute for feeling safe and secure.
In reality, of course, the more, if you have a weapon in your house,
your chance of going dying goes skyrocketing.
Those are matter of statistics and facts, but they don't care about facts.
They have that many weapons in the house,
including some that look like they're out of some ridiculous Rambo movie.
>> Yeah, chance of one of them dying is much,
higher than if they had no weapons in the house.
>> So over the weekend,
I interviewed an associate professor over at Harvard for Jacobin.
And he's done a lot of extensive research on the incarceration rate in
the United States.
And how we incarcerate more people than any other developed country.
And I promise this all connects.
So the United States compared to other developed countries
stands out in terms of its violence in terms of violent crime.
And part of the reason why is because the United States does not have a robust
welfare state, right?
And so that leads to people feeling this sense of insecurity,
this lack of safety, they think they need the guns to protect themselves.
Which I get like that's a rational thought.
And so people start arming themselves thinking that they are Rambo.
Thinking that they can protect themselves in any and
all situations where someone poses a threat.
But that gun culture has just kind of snowballed into what we see in that image,
right?
Part of it is political and cultural pandering.
But part of it is also just this thought that guns are fun toys.
When in reality like if the right wing believes in the right to bear arms,
they should take it seriously.
They should treat it as a weapon that could do mass harm to people around them.
And they should be preaching responsibility with guns.
But they don't do that, they treat it as a toy,
they treat it as if it's not a big deal at all.
And we just see more and more death and destruction as a result of that.
I mean we've had 32 school shootings in this country since August of this year,
32.
>> In three months.
>> It's crazy.
>> Not mass shootings, school shootings.
It's mass shootings are a much larger number because there's nonstop
massacres in America.
We call mass shootings, there's a different word for it.
It is very literal.
It's massacre, we average one massacre a day in America.
And it's because the right wing thinks it's awesome and really cool.
We have come to accept it in America.
We're like, at any moment,
any of us can get massacred by the right wing lunatics who walk around us.
And that have weapons all over them.
And the minute anyone gets a little agitated there like a government
tyranny murder everyone okay or whatever.
I got starts running in my head or I don't like you or your antifa or
you threw a plastic bag at me or you have skittles in your pocket whatever murder.
And they celebrated, John Pacino asked a good question.
It was saying when I had a look at the picture a couple of times.
He's one of our members, TYT.com/join to become a member and be part of the show.
He said, is that a little girl pointing a gun at her mom's head.
And I looked carefully, it appears she's not pointing it at the mom's head.
But it's close and obviously those weapons shouldn't be loaded.
But are you sure they're not loaded?
Look at the lunatic parents in the pictures,
smiling broadly as they have these gigantic guns.
And I guess the dad has the shortest penis because like he has overcome all over
this guy, I could murder dozens, maybe hundreds of people with this thing.
I'd be such a good murderer.
Okay, right, we enjoy, but it's super scary.
We live in a crazy country.
>> And remember the parents of the Oxford high school shooter are now
facing involuntary manslaughter charges for making the gun so
accessible to their 15 year old son.
And just after that Massie thought it was a great idea to post that photo.
>> He's a United States Congress.
>> And he's not the first one who has done this.
They do this all the time.
This is a common occurrence in Republican politics.
And again, one last point, if you live in Japan or
England or any other civilized country.
You think, yeah, I know he's a congressman for now, but
obviously he's not going to get elected again.
After putting having a little kid in the picture with high powered weapon here
looking like a lunatic.
Having his whole family looked like a bunch of murderers ready to shoot
themselves each other.
People that come in, innocent people obviously not gonna get elected again.
No, he'll win easily.
People look in his district, look at that and go and that's what's really scary.
They look at that and they go, yeah man, they are ready for murder.
I like these guys.