The right’s attempts to grapple with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that claimed the lives of over 20 people, mostly young children, would be comical if their implications were not so troubling. Suffice to say, you won’t find much in the way of meaningful suggestions or solutions to the problem of gun violence in the words of prominent movement conservatives.

You will, however, glimpse some of the arguments that they will likely employ in an effort to curb efforts at common-sense gun control in the coming months. You’ll also get a sense of just how delusional much of the contemporary right (including the perennially revolting Mike Huckabee and James Dobson) is, rendered all the more disconcerting by the tragic enormity of the event they are so eager to whitewash with tired ideological palliatives.

Some of the quotes you are about to read are patently absurd, others extremely offensive and still others simply make no sense. Nevertheless, they are worth reading if for no reason than to see how various contingents of the radical right transpose their warped ideological views onto a national tragedy. Credit to National Review, NBC News and The Atlantic for the following quotes.

“We’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

-Mike Huckabee, Former Governor of Arkansas and candidate in 2008 G.O.P. primaries

“We have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty, I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on… I mean, millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist or he’s irrelevant to me, and we have killed 54 million babies, and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.”

-James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family

“Does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment? The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. …With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?”

-Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA

“A feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak — but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza… There are things you can do. Run is one of them, because most shooters can’t hit a moving target. The other, if you are in a confined space, is throw things at the killer, or try a tackle.”

-Charlotte Allen, author of The Human Christ

“I remember sitting in a theater watching Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In an earlier age of cinema men were shot off horses and tumbled to the ground dead with scarcely a trickle of blood. In Kubrick the violence was realistic, minutely detailed, and terrifying. But what was more terrifying was the audience’s cheers at the crimes of Alex de Large, the film’s monstrous anti-hero. This was in 1971. The slippery slope is steep and longer than we knew. Laws cannot work where our fallenness has so much fuel.”

-Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute

“…We can’t deceive ourselves that legislation or any other policy reform can redeem a fallen world… Like Job, we must trust our Creator, the God who gave us life and loved us enough to send a Savior.”

-David French of the American Center for Law and Justice

“What is the role of a culture where each minute, three developing human beings are legally killed in their mother’s womb? Mother Teresa said that abortion is “war on children” and the greatest destroyer of peace. What is the possible role of demonic spirits? An evangelical Christian pastor was asked about this on a national talk show this week and spoke of “the existence of dark forces,” yet shrank from speaking explicitly about demonic possession. What is the role of a culture in which more than 40 percent of children go to sleep in homes where their father does not live?”

-Thomas Lickona of the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (Respect and Responsibility) at the State University of New York at Cortlan

Click here for the Flatiron Pundit’s reaction to the theological implications of the Sandy Hook shooting and its national fallout.