December 5, 2021

Days After the Michigan School Shooting, a GOP Lawmaker Posted a Gun-Filled Family Photo

“Santa, please bring ammo.”

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) waves around a tiny handgun at a 2020 pro-gun rally.Bryan Woolston/Getty

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On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted a holiday-themed family photo to his Twitter account. The image featured a decorated Christmas tree, Massie’s smiling wife and kids, and seven guns that appear to be a mix of semi-automatic rifles and machine guns.

“Merry Christmas!” he wrote. “Santa, please bring ammo.”

Massie shared the photo less than a week after prosecutors charged 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley for allegedly killing four people and wounding seven at his high school in Oxford, Michigan—the deadliest such shooting in the US this year. That timing, mixed with the jarring visual, evoked a barrage of criticism from Massie’s fellow lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well as from gun advocates. (Massie’s last brush with public condemnation came in August, when he wrote another tweet comparing vaccination mandates to the Holocaust.)

“I’m old enough to remember Republicans screaming that it was insensitive to try to protect people from gun violence after a tragedy,” wrote Rep. John Yarmuth (D–Ky.), Massie’s House colleague from Kentucky, on Twitter. “Now they openly rub the murder of children in our faces like they scored a touchdown. Disgraceful.”

“I promise not everyone in Kentucky is an insensitive asshole,” he added in another tweet.

Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger chimed in, tweeting that he supported the second amendment, “but this isn’t supporting [the] right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish.”

In a CNN appearance on Saturday, Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin was killed in the 2018 shooting at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, described Massie’s post as “very nasty,” calling it “something that should teach us who should we elect, and not.”

Fellow Parkland father Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter Jaime in the shooting, replied directly to Massie’s post.

“Since we are sharing family photos, here are mine,” he wrote above his last photo of his daughter and another of her grave.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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