Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is blasting the father of accused Oregon shooter Chris Harper Mercer as a “complete failure” as a parent.
Jindal said poor parenting and America’s violent pop culture were to blame for the mass shooting last week, not the nation’s gun laws, in a statement on Tuesday.
{mosads}“He’s a complete failure as a father [and] he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public,” said Jindal, a Republican presidential contender, about Ian Mercer, the father of Chris Harper Mercer. “He’s the real problem here.”
Jindal’s comments follow last week’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. Chris Harper Mercer, 26, is accused of killing nine students and wounding nine others before committing suicide.
Ian Mercer earlier this week called for tougher gun control measures in the wake of his son’s shooting rampage.
But Jindal on Tuesday rebuffed those calls and said the real issue was the country’s lack of values.
“These acts of evil are a direct result of cultural rot, and it is cultural rot that we have brought upon ourselves,” he said. “We glorify sick and senseless acts of violence in virtually every element of our pop culture, and we have been doing that for at least a generation.
“We devalue human life, we have no regard for the sanctity of human life in any regard — from the unborn, to the old and to every single person in between — we devalue it and act as if we have almost no regard for humanity.”
Jindal argued on Tuesday that the breakdown of traditional families in the U.S. is creating more people like Chris Harper Mercer.
“Our families are a complete mess, and we have raised tens of millions of young boys who will never become real men because they have no values whatsoever, they have no truth in their lives and they have no regard for common decency,” he said.
The shooting renewed the debate over the nation’s gun laws, with President Obama vowing to “politicize” gun violence and Democrats pushing for tougher restrictions.
But many Republican presidential contenders, including Jindal, have questioned if more stringent gun laws are the solution.
“Meanwhile, the shallow and simple-minded liberals will continue to blame pieces of hardware for the problem,” Jindal said. “And they will long for the days before firearms were invented.
“This mess is not nearly as complicated as we pretend,” the Louisiana governor continued.
“It’s the old computer axiom — garbage in, garbage out,” Jindal said. “We fill our culture with garbage, and we reap the result.”