Miranda Devine: 6 People Are Dead and All Jokin’ Joe Biden Can Do Is Sow the Rancor and Division That Got Us Here

Joe Biden really reached deep into his fabled store of empathy this week to crack jokes on two occasions when the topic was the Nashville Christian school shooting. 

First on Monday, before an audience in the White House four hours after the tragedy, he rolled out his old gag of “I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband” along with a reference to chocolate chip ice cream.

Then he attempted to blame Republicans over gun control: “I call on Congress, again, to pass my ­assault weapons ban.” 

The next day, asked by reporters if he agreed with a Republican senator that Christians were targeted in the attack on the Covenant School in Nashville, he made a nasty partisan gibe. 

“Josh Hawley believes they were,” said a reporter. 

“Well, then I probably don’t, then,” replied the president, with a mirthless chuckle before saying, “I’m joking.” 

Three innocent 9-year-old children are dead, along with three school staffers who tried to protect them.

And all the president can do is sow more of the rancor and division that got us to this point. 

He is not interested in comforting the bereaved or reassessing his own role in stoking the mental health crisis that’s engulfing America’s youth, or speaking against the current anti-Christian fever in the country. 

The victims of Nashville’s Covenant School are just another political weapon to him.

All he has is sociopathic indifference in the guise of vacuous virtue-signaling. 

He knows his “assault weapons ban” isn’t the answer, won’t happen, and just fuels more division. 

There are 400 million guns in private ownership in this country under the protection of the Second Amendment.

If Biden didn’t get his bill through when Democrats controlled everything in Washington, he’s not going to get it through now. 

But he doesn’t even pretend to look for a good-faith remedy that everyone can get behind. 

There ought to be some way to agree, for instance, that a mentally ill, suicidal person like transgender shooter Audrey Hale should not be able so easily to legally purchase seven firearms, as police said she did before she shot her way into the Christian elementary school Monday. 

More urgently, Biden needs to stop stoking the culture wars by forcing a twisted ideology onto children.

This peculiar obsession with children’s genitals by his ­administration is fueling a cultural contagion that exacerbates America’s mental health crisis in ways we can’t yet imagine. 

This is Biden’s pet project.

He likes nothing better than encouraging the delusion that puberty blockers and mutilating surgeries will turn boys into girls and girls into boys. 

He takes a malicious delight in demonizing red states like Florida that are enacting legislation to protect children from activists trying to sow gender confusion, and he panders to the rancid lie that conservatives and Christians are bigots responsible for a “transgender genocide.” 

Just two weeks ago, Biden went on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central and fanned the moral panic about what he called “transgender kids.” 

“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. I mean it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” he said. 

“It’s not like, you know, a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I want to become a man’ or ‘I want to become a woman’ or ‘I wanna change.’”

“I mean what, what, what, what are they thinking about? 

Attacking parental rights 

“They’re human beings. They love, they have feelings, they have inclinations that are, I mean, it’s just to me, I don’t know, it’s cruel …” 

“And the way we do it is we make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law and you’re going to be held accountable.” 

We should be clear about what Biden is attacking here.

The Florida legislation simply stops schools from secretly propagandizing 4- to 9-year-olds on gender identity and sexual orientation, which is what has been happening without parental knowledge.

The angry scenes at school board meetings all over the country show that parents don’t like being hoodwinked. 

With his faux compassion, Biden is helping fuel a malign, $2 billion industry that hooks children as young as 8 on harmful ­puberty-blocking drugs and sets them on a lifelong treadmill of cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgery. 

Adults who suffer from gender dysphoria — the sense of being trapped in a body of the wrong sex — deserve compassion and understanding, which is the very essence of Christianity. 

If adults want to undergo hormone treatment and sex-change surgery, that is their right, but not children.

Doctors used to adopt a “watch and wait” stance because most gender questioning resolves itself through puberty.

And as the infamous Tavistock youth-gender clinic in the UK eventually admitted, 80 to 90% of the children referred for treatment were just gay.

The LGB Alliance had warned for years that the clinic was carrying out “conversion therapy on gay kids,” but only after countless children were harmed did it close last year. 

No such restraint is happening here.

It has been left up to parents rights groups and red-state legislators to try to fence off their children from the predation of trans activists. 

Nashville police have not released the so-called “manifesto” left by Hale, but her immediate transmogrification into a transgender martyr on social media shows you how dangerously ­unhinged the situation has become in America. 

Links have been drawn from the Covenant School massacre to an upcoming “Trans Day of Vengeance” this week, and Twitter has been removing thousands of posts of trans activists holding guns and threatening violence against Christians: “Kill christcucks,” one said. 

This is the mentality Biden is encouraging.

Maybe he doesn’t understand, but someone needs to talk sense into him before it’s too late.