As Miranda noted yesterday, Jody Hice, a Religious Right activist and radio host with a long history of making outrageous statements, won a run-off election in Georgia to become the official Republican Party nominee for a seat in Congress.
Hice seems to have almost completely wiped away the archives of his radio broadcasts when he decided to run for office but some of his programs still remain available, such as this one posted on YouTube in which Hice reacts to the 2012 shooting that killed twelve people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado by blaming the separation of church and state, legal abortion, and evolution.
“The more the Judeo-Christian principles of our Founders are removed,” Hice said, “the more you can expect Batman theater-type events taking place, the more you can expect Columbine and Virginia Tech-type tragedies occurring in America. This is what you get absent God.”
Hice went on to blame things like legal abortion and the teaching of evolution is schools for conditioning people to accept the idea that “life is meaningless” and “the more we promote that junk … the more we will get this type of result”:
Hice then spent the second half of his program warning that liberals would seek to use the shooting to push for gun control, prompting him to stake out the extreme position that there are to be no limits on the Second Amendment because American citizens have the right to possess literally any weapon that the government possesses.
“It is my belief that any, any, any, any weapon that our government and law enforcement possesses,” Hice said, “ought to be allowed for individuals to possess in this country.”
Apparently this applies to tanks, fighter jets, and even nuclear weapons because, Hice argued, so long as people can pay for them and don’t have a criminal record, they have a right to protect themselves from a tyrannical government with the same weapons that the government can use against them.
“The Second Amendment,” he said, “is about us defending ourselves against potentially tyrannical government. You cannot defend yourself with a BB gun if your opponent has cannons and bazookas and missiles”:
