The National Rifle Association's Death Rattle

It's not as if we had expected anything much from the National Rifle Association, when they announced they'd hold a press conference today that would make a positive contribution to the controversy raised by the Sandy Hook School massacre.  This organization has stood by its guns (pun intended) through thick and thin, and there's no reason to suppose they'd suddenly change their worn tune.

In fact, what Executive Veep Wayne LaPierre delivered was even less than "not much."  It was nothing, and it was laughable.  LaPierre proposed (are you ready for this?) that an armed police officer should be deployed in every school in the land!

Thus LaPierre and the NRA:

• Try to lay blame for mass shootings on everybody except themselves. They're totally blameless!
• Offer an insensitive and uncaring "solution" that's completely divorced from the issue of real concern to the public.
• Propose to turn our schools into police states - is this a healthy thing?
• Seek to use the debate surrounding a national tragedy to leverage even more gun sales.
• Put the burden of protecting our schools from the NRA's inflexibility on the public. (Blame the victim, and make him pay for it too!)
• Fail to say where the money for all the rent-a-cops will come from. (If the NRA were prepared to fund it, we might take their proposal a little more seriously).

To add insult to injury, the NRA obviously threw up a hasty proposal without really thinking it through:  For example, How many schools are in the U.S.?  10,000?  Probably many more than that, yet LaPierre tosses off the cost of the project with the thought that there must be money in government budgets.  Or another example: Won't any would-be killer just find the rent-a-cop and kill him first, still leaving kids unprotected? 

"Guns" has not become a dirty word, as LaPierre suggests.  It's more complicated than that, and he knows it.  By refusing to budge from its own hardened-artery position - i.e. that every citizen should have a weapon intended for mass killing -  the NRA has shown it has no clothes. 

They should have realized it would have been better for them not to have said anything, than to say this. An organization that sticks to extreme, outmoded, and indefensible positions and refuses to accept change is a dying organization.  It's the beginning of the end for the NRA.

 

Comments

[Dick Klade]

Agree that LaPierre's statement was ludicrous. Earlier this morning I issued a post along the same lines. I have some rather intelligent friends who are long-time NRA members. It's hard to believe they support NRA positions, but they do. They seem to have a blind spot when it comes to even the slightest perceived threat that someone or something "is going to take our guns away." I don't fully understand it, and probably never will.