It's the holidays, and a school shooter recently stole the lives of four Michigan children, so, naturally, some consider it the perfect time for assault rifle jokes.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado both recently tweeted family Christmas cards showing themselves and their kids posing with assault weapons, raising the bile of millions and succeeding at transparent ploys for attention.

There used to be a time when, after a school shooting, GOP politicians and lobbyists would mostly stay quiet, claiming it was "too soon" to talk about our increasingly lax gun laws, postponing any action.

They knew that delays served as opportunities for lobbyists to intervene, for gun makers to dispense money, for pundits to prevaricate, for politicians to lie — and that by the time it was deemed appropriate to discuss whether we should allow anyone to have and carry anywhere as many guns of as many types as they wanted, well, by the time we got around to that conversation, the sharp tang of grief would have faded for all except those who'd watched the bodies of their children be lowered into the ground.

GOP politicians and lobbyists knew that, after such a delay, they might hide that a majority in our country favor more gun restrictions and two-thirds of Americans don't even own a gun. They knew they could ignore that law enforcement organizations want limits on the types of guns people can own and where they can bring them. They knew they could distract from the fact that making limitless amounts of high-powered, high-capacity weapons available to everyone threatens everyone — even (or perhaps especially) the guns' owners themselves.

Once the "too soon" time had passed, the outrage machine would've moved on to a new topic (hopefully, from their view, some juicy culture war squabble) and the lives lost, needlessly taken at the altar of gun worship, would be forgotten.

Now, though, there is no longer even a brief pause in nasty rhetoric after a school shooting.

The corporate benefactors of increasing gun sales, and the pundits and politicians they've purchased with their blood money, have been emboldened.

They know they've fully won the war against even minor, reasonable gun restrictions. The National Rifle Association and other lobbyists have properly fleeced rational gun owners in their quest to remove all rules and limitations, and their money has done its job. They have bought politicians who have installed judges who will no longer even entertain the thought that the framers of the Constitution perhaps did not envision the existence of a gun so powerful it could shoot 150 bullets per minute through a metal door.

That conversation has concluded.

Conservative politicians and pundits no longer feel the need to address why it's traumatic for children to wear masks at school but not for kids as young as 5 to hide under their desks in preparatory active shooter drills.

As a nation, we now skip even the most rudimentary mourning and rocket directly into the kinds of assaults on good taste that Massie and Boebert perpetrated.

They should feel shame, but instead they feel only a cheap thrill from needling their political opponents.

It's a cheap thrill because, like a drug, the high is transitory. They will need more, soon, and more and more of it to fill the hole they've dug in their own hearts, the hole they've created where compassion should be.

To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the orator and writer who died almost exactly 10 years ago: Even if you don't believe in hell, some people give you reason to wish there were one for them to go to.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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