The five stages of Republican candidate reactions after mass shootings

Mass shooting events in America happen at an alarming rate, with roughly one every day. When an attack hits the headlines, like the recent shootings in San Bernardino, California, and Colorado Springs, the prospective Republican candidates for president have a clear playbook.

Stage 1: Silence.

First off, advisers will be telling their candidate: don’t say anything. After all, the initial reports of any mass shooting are likely to be confused and are often inaccurate.

Sometimes these events gain wider traction; often they will sink without a trace. Obviously, in the first instance it would be irresponsible to comment on what might be an ongoing situation.

Republican candidates did not exactly remain silent following the San Bernardino shooting. On Thursday, Texas senator Ted Cruz linked the shootings to the recent Paris attacks, telling donors and activists at the Republican Jewish Coalition that he was concerned the events in San Bernardino were related to terrorism and that the US was currently in a time of war.

“At this point, the details of what happened in San Bernardino are still unclear,” Cruz said, referring to the shooting on Wednesday that left at least 14 people dead. “But our prayers are with the families of those who were murdered and those who were shot. And all of us are deeply concerned that this is yet another manifestation of terrorism, radical Islamic terrorism here at home. Coming on the wake of a terror attack in Paris, this horrific murder underscores that we are in a time of war.”

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson called the shooting a “hate crime” on Wednesday.

Commenting responsibly was doubly true in the Colorado Springs case, which is freighted with problems for the Republican candidates.

The attacker reportedly said “no more baby parts” to law enforcement when he was being taken into custody. He was apparently referring to widely discredited videos made by an anti-abortion group which purported to show a Planned Parenthood clinic selling foetus parts – a reference which candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina baldly lied about. Other candidates, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, had also previously condemned Planned Parenthood over the videos.

So it wasn’t until the following day that any of the candidates addressed the issue at all, and not until Sunday – when they could no longer avoid the questions put to them on the morning TV show circuit – that they really talked about the attack.

Stage 2: Prayer

After a tragedy has been confirmed, candidates often respond by offering prayers and sympathies. The facts of the shooting and the identity of the suspect may still be murky but the candidates have the ability to at least show their awareness of the tragedy without weighing in.

After the San Bernardino shooting, almost all Republican candidates offered sentiments of “thoughts and prayers”, easily filing into a pattern that has emerged after mass shootings.

After Colorado Springs, it was Texas senator Ted Cruz who was the first to offer his sentiments:

Bush put out a statement on Sunday saying there was “no acceptable explanation for this violence, and I will continue to pray for those who have been impacted”, while Ohio governor John Kasich tweeted that “senseless violence has brought tragedy to Colorado Springs. I pray for the families in mourning and have hope our nation can heal”.

The neat rhetorical flourish visible in all these early missives is a sense that the candidates denounce the attack while also removing all sense of human agency. “Senseless.” “No acceptable explanation.”

The only notable exception to this was Huckabee, who called the attack an act of “domestic terrorism” on CNN on Sunday, though he managed to also equate the shooting with abortion itself: “There’s no excuse for killing other people, whether it’s happening inside the Planned Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die, or whether it’s people attacking Planned Parenthood.”

Stage 3: ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people’

This line of reasoning is so common as to be entirely cliche at this point. In October, then candidate and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal placed the blame for the shootings on the “serious cultural decay in our society”. In a rambling note posted on his website, he pointed the finger at pop culture; violent video games; and TV shows and music that “promote evil”.

Kasich, in a speech to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, after the shooting at Umpqua community college in Oregon in October, said, “I don’t think gun control would solve this problem … the deeper issue is alienation. The deeper issue is loneliness.”

Special mention goes to former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who is reportedly still running for the Republican nomination. After the horrific on-air shooting of two journalists in Roanoke, Virginia, in August, Gilmore said that “every shooting tragedy, whether it is in Virginia, Massachusetts or Colorado, has one thing in common: they were all perpetrated by people.” Rubio echoed these comments, saying: “It’s not the guns, it’s the people who are committing these crimes.”

Stage 4: Shift the focus to mental health

If Republicans sense that there is a danger the conversation might shift to uncomfortable territory, such as the link between firearm proliferation and increasing gun violence, they will shift agency from God to madness.

After Roanoke, Trump told CNN that the attack “isn’t a gun problem, this is a mental problem”. He continued: “In the old days, they had mental institutions for people like this, because he was really, definitely borderline and definitely would have been and should have been institutionalized.”

This tactic has already been heavily documented, and the Colorado Springs attack was no different. Huckabee, on CNN, said that the shooter had been a “very unstable person”. Florida senator Marco Rubio told New Hampshire radio station WKXL that America needed “to be more serious about how we address mental health.” (He also blamed “societal breakdown”.)

Stage 5: Integrate the attack into the campaign

This is the final stage, usually a few days after the attack, when the tragedy can be safely integrated into the more everyday message of the campaign.

Trump moved quickly after the San Bernardino shootings, although it was mostly via Twitter. On Thursday, he retweeted a supporter who appeared to suggest that mass shootings help Trump’s poll numbers.

Especially common is the “if only the victims had been carrying guns” argument, as epitomised by Trump after the Chattanooga shooting in July, in which four US marines were killed:

In the case of Colorado Springs, Fiorina felt comfortable hitting out at the left for “demonising the messenger” in blaming anti-abortion campaigners.

The waters are somewhat muddied by the anti-abortion campaign in the case of Colorado Springs. But usually, this is also the stage at which candidates will condemn anyone who dares to mention that a national conversation about gun control is desperately needed.

After the massacre in June at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, former Texas governor and then candidate Rick Perry spoke out against what he called a “knee-jerk” reaction from President Obama. “This is the MO of this administration, anytime there is an accident like this,” Perry said. “The president is clear: he doesn’t like Americans’ guns … he uses every opportunity to parrot that message.”

And who could forget Carson’s quote after Umpqua that he “never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away”?