The Politics of Hollow Platitudes

Thoughts and prayers have become America’s ritual of surrender; comforting the powerful, silencing accountability, and ensuring the next memorial is already being planned.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Remember to follow him on Substack for more by clicking here. Michael just hit 500,000 subscribers on YouTube! Subscribe today for free here and let’s keep the momentum going!

March For Our Lives: A young boy holds a sign that says Action underneath the words Thoughts and Prayers crossed out at the march to end gun violence on 6th Ave, NEW YORK MAR 24 2018. Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock.com.

America doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a cowardice problem.

We dress it up in constitutional rhetoric, wrap it in flags, and anesthetize ourselves with ritualistic grief, but at its core, this is a failure of nerve and leadership. We know exactly what’s happening. We know why it’s happening. And year after year, body after body, we choose not to stop it.

I’ve been to the White House Christmas party. And let me be crystal clear—no sarcasm intended—they’re fun. The lights are dazzling. The Marine Band plays on cue. The halls smell like pine, polish, and power. People laugh easily. Photos are snapped constantly. Champagne flows like accountability rarely does. It’s America dressed up as a Hallmark movie, convincing itself everything is fine.

And this year, as that party carried on behind guarded gates and wreath-lined corridors, the President and First Lady offered the most predictable response in American political life: thoughts and prayers.

Thoughts and prayers for the students senselessly murdered at Brown University. Thoughts and prayers for Jewish families in Australia who gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate the start of Hanukkah, only to watch Day Two transform into a memorial after antisemitic violence shattered what should have been joy.

Thoughts and prayers. The laziest phrase in the American lexicon. It costs nothing. It risks nothing. And it changes absolutely nothing.

Here’s the truth Americans are trained not to confront: thoughts and prayers are not leadership. They are surrender dressed up as empathy.

So far this year, the United States has experienced more than 400 mass shootings. Seventy at schools alone. Seventy classrooms turned into crime scenes. Seventy reminders that in America, active-shooter drills are treated like fire drills, and children are expected to adapt to the possibility of execution as part of their education.

And still—nothing.

We are told this is the price of freedom. We’re fed the same recycled talking points. We’re instructed to worship the Second Amendment without context, without limits, and without regard for the bodies piling up beneath it. We mourn loudly, briefly, performatively, and then legislate quietly—which is to say, not at all.

Now let’s talk about what actual leadership looks like.

Australia already has some of the toughest gun laws on the planet. And yet, after the Bondi Beach massacre, their leaders didn’t hide behind platitudes. They didn’t say “now is not the time.” They didn’t pretend the problem was too complex or politically inconvenient. They did what adults entrusted with power are supposed to do: they reassessed reality and acted.

They’ve done it before. Nearly 30 years ago, after a lone gunman slaughtered 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania using semiautomatic weapons, Australia responded with a speed that should embarrass every American lawmaker. Within two weeks—two weeks—they enacted sweeping gun reforms: bans, buybacks, national registration, strict licensing. Opposition screamed. The gun lobby protested. And the government listened politely, then did it anyway.

The results speak louder than any NRA press release or donation.

Between July 2023 and June 2024, Australia recorded just 31 gun-related murders. Thirty-one. That’s a homicide rate of 0.09 per 100,000 people. In America, we wouldn’t even call that a statistic. We’d call it a rounding error.

New Zealand followed the same moral playbook after the Christchurch massacre in 2019, when an Australian-born right-wing extremist live-streamed the murder of 51 worshippers at two mosques. Less than a month later, New Zealand banned semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles and launched a buyback program. Democracy survived. Freedom survived. People survived.

Australia isn’t pretending it has solved everything. Legal gun ownership has crept back up, now exceeding four million firearms—more than before the 1996 crackdown. That uncomfortable fact forced another reckoning after Bondi.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese didn’t mince words or waste time. Australia’s states and territories agreed to pursue tougher controls: limiting licenses to citizens, capping the number and type of firearms, requiring licenses to expire with more frequent suitability checks, and tightening restrictions on imports, including 3D-printed weapons and high-capacity equipment.

They’re even fixing bureaucratic failures, like completing a national firearms registry that somehow, in 2025, still relied on paper records in some jurisdictions. And instead of using that as an excuse to stall, Albanese used it as a reason to move faster.

“If there’s more that can be done, we will do it,” he said. “We will do whatever is necessary.”

Imagine hearing that from American leadership—and believing it.

In New South Wales, where the Bondi shooter legally owned six firearms under a recreational license, officials are finally asking questions that should have been asked years ago. The premier put it bluntly: if you’re not a farmer, not in agriculture, why do you need weapons that endanger the public and make life more dangerous for police?

That question should reverberate through every statehouse, every congressional hearing room, and every cable news studio in the United States.

Instead, we throw parties. We lower flags. We offer prayers. And we accept mass death as the cost of doing business in America.

It isn’t.

America’s obsession with guns has nothing to do with freedom. It’s about fear, profit, and political cowardice. Other democracies have proven—repeatedly—that mass slaughter is not inevitable. It’s a choice.

So enough with the thoughts and prayers. They don’t stop bullets. Leadership does.

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