Jim Lucas' quest for sympathy

That’s because the rest of us apparently all are so desperate to take his precious guns away from him that we’re willing to sacrifice our friends and neighbors, our siblings, our parents, our spouses, ourselves and even our children to the cause. Nothing—I mean NOTHING!—matters more to us than coming to get Jim Lucas’ guns.

Maybe someone somewhere will explain the concept of projection to him.

The latest evidence of Lucas’ obsession came in the aftermath of the massacre in Highland Park, Illinois. Even before the anguished cries from that shooting that claimed seven lives had faded away, Lucas struggled to drag the spotlight back to him and his firearms.

He had his knickers in a twist because TheStatehouseFile.com and several other news organizations had noticed one of his Facebook posts. In it, Lucas speculated that the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting—a horror in which 19 little children were slaughtered—could be a “false flag” operation designed to, you guessed it, allow the federal government to come and get his guns.

Really.

When quite a few people, including me, suggested that Lucas’ notion was—we’ll be charitable here—more than a touch loony, the state representative grew huffy.

It’s okay for him to suggest that other people are eager to sacrifice small children by the hundreds and thousands to get his guns, but, to his eyes, it's a grave offense for anyone to even hint that what he’s saying makes no sense.

Because, again, one must remember that, in Lucas-world, Jim Lucas and his guns are always the real victims.

Not the 2-year-old who lost both parents in the Highland Park shooting.

Nor the young woman who saw her mother shot dead before her eyes and only had a second to say goodbye before the daughter herself scurried to safety.

No, our sympathies should be reserved only for Jim Lucas and his guns.

Every time.

All the time.

When the mayor of Uvalde said he had lost confidence in the state of Texas’s investigation into the shooting and worried that a cover-up might be taking place, Lucas claimed vindication.

He took to social media to taunt the news outlets and journalists who dared question him. He even wrote a response to an editorial in a local newspaper, whining that the writer hadn’t signed his or her name.

Sigh.

Editorials aren’t signed because they represent the institutional voice of the newspaper, not the views of any one individual. This means not just one person, but an entire newspaper’s opinion operation thought Lucas’ notions were—again, we’ll be charitable—just a little bit loopy.

But let’s get back to Uvalde and the mayor’s concerns.

The mayor worried that Texas officials were covering things up not to obscure a huge conspiracy by the federal government to take people’s guns—Lucas’ fevered fantasy—but to cover up their own bumbling and incompetence. They’re trying to hide the fact that they are screw-ups, not that they’re omnipotent supervillains intent upon world domination.

The fact that Lucas thinks the mayor’s musings “vindicate” him is vintage Jim Lucas. He hates facts almost as much as he loves guns.

His argument here is the equivalent of saying that “oafish” and “oblivious” mean exactly the same thing because they both start with the letter “o.”

But that’s the thing with conspiracy theorists. Everything, whether it fits or even makes a lick of sense, must be shoved into their obsessive notion of some vast hidden plan.

In Lucas’ case, this means everyone everywhere who hasn’t elevated gun worship to the status of a new religion is persecuting him simply because we’d like to see fewer innocent people die in firearms-related tragedies.

That’s why he always drags the conversation back to the inanimate objects that are his firearms rather than the human beings who have been killed and wounded. That’s also why he seems to care more about “proving” his latest wacky notion than he does that a 2-year-old just lost both his parents for no good or understandable reason.

Bless him.