Last Friday, right when most of the political press was trying to figure out when to start drinking so as to be precisely drunk enough to find Hillary Clinton’s “Saturday Night Live” appearance funny, Jeb Bush said something stupid. Asked whether mass shootings, like the one that devastated a community college in Oregon the day before, could be averted through prayer vigils, Bush said:
We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think that more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s just, it’s very sad to see. But I resist the notion — and I did, I had this, this challenge as governor, because we have — look, stuff happens. There’s always a crisis and the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.
As soon as the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reported Bush’s “stuff happens” comment, Twitter blew up. But although the Internet is generally in a state of perpetual overreaction, this felt like one of the rare occasions when the histrionics were deserved. For nearly the 300th time just this year, someone in America had used a gun to kill or maim at least four other people. And Bush, a man with a decent shot of becoming president, did little more than shake his head, sigh, and say, “Guns, boy, I don’t know.”