It's a Wil Wheaton situation!

Hey, you know what's way easier than confronting our national epidemic of gun violence?  Getting outraged at Wil Wheaton. Wait, who? you ask. Get out. I reply. And then I remember that you're reading my blog and not in the room with me so I'll just explain. Will Wheaton played Wesley Crusher, boy genius on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but has since parlayed his kind of annoying character into a place in the geek pantheon, doing voice work, tv and just general nerdery.

Captain Picard used to let him fly the ship because he knew his mom way back when.
Which must have sucked if you were a Starfleet officer who worked your entire
career to get a job on the Enterprise, only to get passed over for some wonder teen.

Turns out getting conservatives to be
outraged is like, super-easy.

Anyway, right-leaning media outlets have demanded that we all get outraged over a Tweet Wheaton uh...tweeted in response to Speaker Paul Ryan's Tweet about yesterday's shooting at a church in Texas. Still with me? Great. Ryan's initial Tweet, which I'm sure was genuine and coming from a good place, said that the people of Sutherland Springs, where the shooting took place, 'need our prayers...' Whatever you think of Paul Ryan and whatever your worldview, religious or not, his comment was pretty innocuous.

Then Will Wheaton kind of jumped all over him with his Tweet:

In Wheaton's defense, Paul Ryan is kind of a sack of shit...

"Americans don't need affordable
health care, they need our prayers."

-Speaker Ryan

Yikes, right? As he later explained in subsequent Tweetings, Wheaton's beef is with Paul Ryan's failure to support reasonable gun control laws, and that he instead just offers his prayers every time something like this happens, which is, you know, really, really often. But sure, the way he said it was little, you know, aggressive? And I can see how religious people could take it as Wheaton saying that prayer is worthless and that everything they believe in is a lie. He's not saying that, but that's what they hear. Sure, emotions are high right now, but sometimes people just like to feel outraged.

Here, check out the Fox News coverage:

People of faith? They mean evangelical Christians, don't they? Why don't
they just say 'evangelical Christians?' This is Fox, they're not fooling anyone.

"After praying? I like to do some
reps. Some reps for The Lord."

-Paul Ryan

The article itself isn't particularly unfair, and it does include Wheaton's later clarifications and apologies, but couldn't the headline just as easily be "Paul Ryan responds to shooting with rote platitudes?" Ok, obviously this is Fox News and "Hollywood trashes Jesus...again!" is more their speed, but I'd still like an answer to Wheaton's implied question: what is Paul Ryan planing to do once he's done praying for Sutherland Springs? I think we're all a little sick of the guns don't kill people line, so what else have they got?

"Trump angers people vulnerable to
bullets with preposterous defense of guns"

-Probably not the headline

Fox is going to go with

At a press conference in Japan, Trump was asked if this most recent shooting might prompt some, you know, reasonable legislative action. He responded:

"Mental health is your problem here. This was a very, based on preliminary reports, a very deranged individual. A lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country as do other countries. This isn't a guns situation..." 

-President Trump on how this 

mass shooting isn't a guns situation

"Guns: making it not be as bad as it was
because it could have been much worse..."

-The NRA's new slogan

Since no blind parroting of NRA talking points would be complete without a suggestion that the solution to gun violence is more fucking guns, the President went on:

"I mean, we could go into it, but it's a little soon to go into it, fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction otherwise it wouldn't have been as bad as it was, it would have been much worse."

-Trump, not so great at off-the-cuff, is he?

That feeling you're feeling? That's just the burning hot sensation of impotent rage, but fortunately there's something you can do about it. You don't have to take this. Put pressure on your representatives in congress. Demand action. Let them know that we, as a people, will no longer sit idly by while celebrities are allowed to Tweet critically about our elected officials' stubborn inaction on the problem of gun violence. I mean, how dare they?

Remember, this isn't a guns situation, it's a Wil Wheaton situation.