Elise Stefanik Likes to Talk About Crime Until It Happens in Her Own District
On Saturday night, a group of friends had driven up the wrong driveway as they were searching for another friend’s house. And as they turned their vehicles around, the owner of the home shot at them.
The 65-year-old homeowner, Kevin Monahan, fired two shots and killed 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, authorities said—for the simple offense of being in the passenger seat of a vehicle that pulled into a wrong driveway before promptly turning around. The violent shooting occurred in upstate New York, in the district represented by Republican Representative Elise Stefanik.
On Tuesday, Stefanik tweeted a Notes-app-style statement that her “heart breaks for the tragedy of the loss of Kaylin Gillis’ young life” and that she fully supports efforts “to ensure justice is served.” But within the hour, Stefanik went back to her regularly scheduled programming of whipping up outrage about crime in New York City.
Stefanik has spent much of her career fearmongering about crime, all the more so amid the Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of twice-impeached former President Donald Trump. She, along with other Republicans, has attempted to discredit Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg by trying to frame New York City as a bastion of crime.
Stefanik, not even a member of the House Judiciary Committee, was invited to join a hearing Monday that falsely framed New York as awash in crime. The New York City crime narrative is a popular one, but as witnesses in the hearing pointed out, New York City is safer than many of the places House Republicans leading the smear campaign come from.
The campaign has been all the more vacuous given that Republicans have put forth no actual solutions to crime that may be taking place, other than building more jails and throwing more people in them. Seldom have they genuinely pursued a broader policy vision they pretend to care about, whether it be improving people’s mental health or combating social alienation.
Meanwhile, Stefanik and other Republicans have blocked any attempt to prevent shootings like the one in her district or in Kansas City, Missouri, where 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot after accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell. After the Nashville school shooting last month, Stefanik called the move for gun control “overly political.” Never mind that more than 160 mass shootings have taken place just this year in America.
Republicans have made it easier, again and again, to access guns in a country ravaged by mass shootings. They have fomented social distrust, in a society where hate and divisiveness have become as American as apple pie.
And in Stefanik’s weak-hearted chicanery, she embodies precisely how hollow it all is. Instead of confronting why our society has produced such anger and why that anger is allowed to so easily access weapons of killing, Stefanik and Republicans are instead inflaming that anger and making sure it is as armed as possible.