“More guns, you’ll claim, are the N.R.A.’s answer to everything,” he said. “Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?” (source)
Note please, Mr. LaPierre, that the headlines will claim that the NRA’s solution to everything is more guns because that is what you fucking said.
I watched the majority of the NRA press conference on Sky News in the empty bar of a hotel in London at oh my god in the morning. It was not the full press conference, mostly because every thirty seconds, the newscaster would break in and say something that roughly translated out to, “Are you fucking kidding me?” (But you know. It sounded more cultured because British accents do that.)
Which is basically how I felt.
Apparently the Sandy Hook shooting is the fault of video games and violent movies. The same video games and movies that are seen in countries throughout the world that don’t have our problem with gun violence.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Seriously, are you five? Have you forgotten that good guys with guns, that good cops, good federal agents, good soldiers get killed every fucking day with guns?
I didn’t expect anything good out of the NRA on this. But I expected better than the hostile call for more guns in schools, the angry finger pointing at the easy scapegoat of video games and the mentally ill, and the logic that we’d normally expect to see out of a kindergartner who hasn’t quite figured out how cause and effect work yet.
In a brief aside at a press conference this morning, the NRA’s chief executive officer blamed elementary school shootings in Newton, Conn, in part on the “nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill.” (source)
National registries of gun owners are a violation of civil liberties, but it’s okay to do that to people who are or have been mentally ill. Right. Because it’s not okay to stigmatize gun ownership, but we should stigmatize the hell out of mental illness because it’s not difficult enough yet for people to get treatment.
There’s that old joke about the doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result being the definition of insanity. Well have we not been trying, over and over again, more guns as a country? More power for the NRA?
Though part of me that hopes this awful, pathetic, angry finger-shaking on the part of the NRA is because they know this time a line has been crossed. It’s the tantrum of an organization that knows things have gone to far and that there’s no going back from this. At least I can hope. Time will tell.