Some sick sons of bitches!
We are listening to the press conference--without any questions allowed from the press--conducted by the National Rifle Association (NRA) in response to the school shooting that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut just one week ago today.
The NRA could have taken this press conference as an opportunity to join in the national debate and discussion regarding the proliferation of semi-automatic weapons of the type that caused the carnage last week. Instead they took the predictable path of blaming the news media and the corporations of this nation, referring to violent movies and video games, as the sole reasons for the proliferation of mass killings in our nations public places.
The only mention of weapons capable of doing what was done in Newtown was to state that the news media mistook them for weapons of war used in places like Afghanistan. This was supposed to be cover for the NRA’s apparent continued promotion of these weapons in the hands of the average American citizen. Their other answer to the gun problem facing this nation was a detailed and comprehensive program to place armed police officers in every school in America. Wayne Lapiere, the vice president of the NRA, introduced former congressman Assa Hutchinson, who would head the program set up by the NRA to protect our nations schools.
What has happened with the NRA is an unveiled attempt to perform an end run around any attempt to introduce any form of gun control legislation by superseding it with their own legislative proposal for congress to fund whatever it takes to protect our nations schools. In essence., what the NRA wants and what it finds as the answer to our national gun problem is more guns and more levels of security.
What chance does an armed and trained security guard have against some future monster decked out in protective armor and well trained in the use of these modern weapons of urban war that so freely exist in our society today? How many guards would be needed to oppose the two killers who terrorized the Columbine school campus a number of years ago. The armed killer of last week, Adam Lanza, fired off hundreds of shots as he killed twenty six innocent and loving people. Would one or two security guards have made any more difference in that outcome?
Looking at the NRA’s proposal, we would need to deploy potential monsters to oppose the monsters already among us!
Are we supposed to put armed guards in our neighborhood movie theaters? Are we supposed to put armed guards in front of our neighborhood supermarkets where those from the Salvation Army ring their bells for donations today and where a United States congressman was shot in the head just over a year or so ago? Are we to put armed guards in every college classroom in the nation so as to prevent what happened at Virginia Tech a few years ago.
What the NRA would like to do is to arm every citizen in America as protection from every other citizen in America. The only valid and useful proposal that we heard from this so called news conference was the idea of creating a national data bank for the mentally ill.
The saddest part about all of this is that the NRA thinks that protecting our schools will protect the NRA from future trouble as they protect the most vulnerable in our society for their own cynical ends. The NRA of 2012 is not the NRA that we knew as a child. It is not the NRA that our fathers and our grandfathers knew that promoted gun safety and hunting safety and safe gun use. The NRA of 2012 is an organization that protects the supposed rights of the most extreme people in this society who exist out on the fringes of it who wake up daily wondering if another Ruby Ridge might occur. These are people who exist in clubs and small cults who prepare daily for some sort of defense against a nation who is coming to take their guns in violation of a second amendment that is really no longer capable of protecting the rest of us from the actions of those who violate its partner in our nations hallowed lexicon: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!
What is a six year old going to think if they see armed men patrolling the halls of our primary schools and what kind of arms would those people need to oppose the kind of arms that the NRA is increasingly protecting in our society. Will we set up fifty caliber machine gun nests with men in armor and in helmets for the very young to pass every day as they go from classroom to classroom?
We have and have had an arms escalation in this nation going on for many years now, and, we wonder just how much further it might have to go. The NRA could not even oppose weapons that fire hundreds of shots in a few minutes, nor could it oppose the enormous amounts of ammunition, some of it armor piercing, that are piling up in stockpiles that have no regulation on them at all. No NRA response to gun shows where forty percent of purchases have no background checks at all.
It is a sad thing to have to say, however, Wayne Lapiere and Assa Hutchinson are, at the least, sick sons of bitches. At the most they are motherless beings that are, in their own way, as large a group of monsters as they would try to protect the rest of us from. The NRA are the pawns of large soulless corporations like Wal-Mart and the gun manufacturers who sell anything that they can as long as the profit margin is there!
It is a simple as that!
And, it will be interesting to see the Republican congressional response to all of this. We have been stating and postulating for some time that congressional Republican are part of a cult, particularly in the House of Representatives, that is increasingly more out of touch with the rest of America. We think that we are about to find out a definition for that in the way that they approach this very emotional issue.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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