Last night a 59-year-old drifter from Alabama, a convicted felon named John Russell Houser went into a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. Once the previews were over, he pulled a pistol and began firing indiscriminately into the audience. He killed two people and wounded nine before he finally turned his pistol on himself. According to AP:

BREAKING: Wife of theater shooter removed guns from home because of his mental state, 2008 documents say.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 24, 2015

And there is more:

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, Houser’s family asked for a temporary protective order against him in 2008, because of his “extreme erratic behavior” and “ominous as well as disturbing statements.” The documents say that Houser had committed “various acts of family violence” and that his wife, Kellie Houser, was so worried that she “removed all guns and/or weapons from their marital residence.” The documents also note that Houser has a history of maniac depression and bipolar disorder.

So the man has been in Louisiana only a short while, he is a drifter with a history of mental problems, he is legally barred from possessing a firearm because he is a convicted felon, but what is the first thing the left does? It blames Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

Instead of doing something about the proliferation of guns and gun violence, Jindal offered only prayer and hugs. Anything else, he suggested, was inappropriate and overtly political. “Now is the time for prayer, now is the time for healing. As far as the political spectrum, this isn’t the time,” Jindal told reporters after a speech in Iowa, where he had begun his remarks by praying for the victims and their families.

“I think it was completely shameful,” Jindal said of Obama’s call for a national discussion about gun control. “Within 24 hours we’ve got the president trying to score cheap political points.”

Now that people have died in a mass shooting in his state — three dead and six injured at a movie theater in Lafayette on Thursday (July 23) — it was, again, not the time to talk about the problem of gun violence. On Thursday night, Jindal, who happened to be in Baton Rouge on a rare visit to Louisiana, rushed to Lafayette to offer prayers and hugs.

When it comes to doing something about the gun violence that afflicts Louisiana, Jindal also offers shrugs. In Jindal’s world, it’s never the right time to debate gun violence or talk about how government should address the problem. And with a mass shooting almost every week, it will never be time in Jindal’s estimation to talk about it. Only hugs and shrugs.

The author of this shabby and nearly incoherent piece is a Louisiana Democrat and, it must be noted, incompetent political hack named Robert Mann. (@RTMannJr) Mann has been a fixture in Louisiana politics for a while and now that the Louisiana Democrat party is basically extinct he has migrated to the only place that sees his skill set as a plus: a tenured position teaching journalism at Louisiana State University. This type of cheap shot mudslinging is what the morally challenged Robert Mann does. He uses his post at LSU and his newspaper column to even scores with his enemies… that would be those people with an IQ exceeding bathwater temperature. For instance, via The Hayride (see their excellent repository of Mann’s rank asshattery here), Mann used his column to attack Jindal over cutting LSU’s budget when it had actually increased.

Mann doesn’t care one way or the other about the people killed in that theater. To him they are useful props. They are corpses that can be used to club Bobby Jindal. Last week there was a triple murder followed by a suicide in Baton Rouge and Mann didn’t say boo. In the era of #BlackLivesMatter you’d think he would have taken notice.

Based on what we know at this time it is difficult to see how the shootings in Baton Rouge could have been prevented. Perhaps it will be revealed that someone knew or suspected but said nothing but right now the facts seem to be that Houser, a man who could not legally possess a firearm, shot up a movie theater and killed himself. It is difficult to see what kind of gun control regime could have prevented this. But Mann doesn’t need a reason to attack other than he’s a liberal Democrat and personal smears are just they way they roll.