The NRA keeps ramping up the nasty, brutish, short, and crazy at its annual meeting

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The NRA has a crazy new neo-Confederate anti-government president and at its annual meeting this weekend in Houston it's been plumbing the depths of gun-nut craziness.

As usual, there was Wayne LaPierre, the face of the organization, using militaristic rhetoric and the usual paranoid delusions of the right to ramp up the fearmongering, as if being able to own any gun you want, whatever your fetish, whatever your own delusions, is the only freedom that matters, or rather the only component of freedom that matters, in the Hobbesian state of nature of the gun nuts' imaginings. (Hobbes viewed the state of nature as a dystopia leading to civil society; LaPierre and the rest of the nuts consider it, or something closely resembling it, their utopia. Yes, what I'm saying is that the NRA's project involves at its core the undoing of civil society and the replacement of it with life that is nasty, brutish, and short.)

And then there was this gem:

Gun owners should store a gun in their kids' room, according to a 'Home Defense Concepts' seminar offered at the National Rifle Association's Annual Meeting, comments that came just days after the fatal shooting of a two-year-old at the hands of her five-year-old brother.

The course was taught by Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training. Pincus argued that, in the event of a home invasion, parents would instinctually run to their children's room anyway, they might as well have a gun stored there to kill two birds with one stone:

PINCUS: How about putting a quick-access safe in your kids' room? [...] Good idea or bad idea? We have an emotional pushback to that. Here’s my position on this. If you're worried that your kid is going to try to break into the safe that is in their bedroom with a gun in it, you have bigger problems than home defense. [Laughter]... In the middle of the night, if I'm in the bathroom or getting a glass of water or in the bedroom or watching TV in the living room, if that alarm goes off and the glass breaks and the dog starts barking, what's the instinct that most people are going to have, in regards to, "am I going to run across the house to get the gun, or am I going to run over here to help the screaming kid?" And if I'm going to go to the kid anyway, and I have an extra gun and an extra safe, why not put it in their closet?

Oh, sure, what could ever go wrong?

Read more »

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy slams NRA, Wayne LaPierre: "reminds me of clowns at the circus."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, fresh off signing the nation's toughest gun restrictions into law, was on CNN yesterday advocating for gun control and taking on the NRA and its main mouthpiece, Wayne LaPierre: "Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus. They get the most attention." He continued:

This guy is so out of whack, it's unbelievable. 92% of the american people want universal background checks. I can't get on a plane as the governor of the State of Connecticut without somebody running a background check on me. Why should you be able to buy a gun? Or buy armor-piercing munitions? It doesn't make any sense. He doesn't make any sense. Thus my reference to the circus...

Bring it back to reality. Why are they against universal background checks when 92% of the American public is in favor of them? If they can't answer that question — and they can't, Candy — What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible even if they're deranged, even if they're mentally ill, evening if they have a criminal background, they don't care. They want to sell guns.

The clown/circus quip is amusing but also putting it lightly. Otherwise, though, Malloy's explanation of the NRA's priorities is right on. It's not just that the NRA is insanely pro-gun (and insane in its general gun nuttery), it's that it's the chief lobbyist for the gun industry. It will stop at nothing to stop anything that might limit the gun industry's ability to make enormous profits, and that means the sale of assault weapons that serve no other (non-military) purpose than mass killing (and the fetishism of enthusiasts, if you can call them that), as well as armor-piercing bullets, and so on.

LaPierre is indeed a clown, of sorts, but he's a very dangerous one given the power and influence of his vile organization.

(I would also note that LaPierre made what has become a key conservative argument against any and all gun control: Criminals won't abide by gun laws, so why bother? But this is basically an argument against all criminal law. Why have laws against murder, or rape, or breaking and entering, or fraud? Like I said, these gun nuts are insane.)

The special security needs of the president's family

By Richard K. Barry

Sometimes the absurd arguments so common among the radical right are even too much for Fox News. In this case, NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre is still trying to argue that President Obama's children live under the same threat as all other school children.

Fox News host Chris Wallace called him out on it over the weekend saying, "that's ridiculous and you know it":

Wallace asked his guest on "Fox News Sunday" if he regretted airing a controversial TV ad in which the NRA went after President Obama for providing armed security to his daughters but not supporting their proposal to put armed guards in all schools.

Prefacing his comments about the absurdity of LaPierre's claim, Wallace said, "you really think that the president's children are the same kind of target as every other school child in America?"

It's a crazy position, but these people do crazy very well.

The first clip is LaPierre being the ass that he is. The second is a scene from The West Wing in which President Bartlett explains to his daughter why her personal security is so important and why she would be such a target. I've been thinking about this a lot since the NRA started spinning their nonsense.

Someone please hand Wayne LaPierre a bigger shovel

By Carl 

Because he clearly doesn't believe he has hit the bottom of his self-dug grave yet:

WASHINGTON — Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the National Rifle Association, angrily accused President Obama on Tuesday of demonizing law-abiding gun owners and of wanting to put "every private personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government."

In a fiery speech at a hunting conference in Nevada, Mr. LaPierre criticized Mr. Obama's Inaugural Address on Monday when the president said Americans should not "mistake absolutism for principle."

That reference, Mr. LaPierre said, was intended as an attack on the N.R.A. and gun owners who believe that the Second Amendment to the Constitution provides an absolute right to bear arms. 

What gun nuts won't tell you is that the Second Amendment is the only one, the only one, that places a condition on a Constitutional right. They'll ignore the language of the first part about a "well-regulated militia" -- and if the Founders were alive to address this, I think they'd acknowledge local police forces as constituting said militiae -- but woe betide anyone who interprets the rest of the Amendment to read as anything but "all the guns we want, all the time."

But then La Pierre doubled down on the stoopit:

"I urge our president to use caution when attacking clearly defined absolutes in favor of his principles," Mr. LaPierre said. "When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti."

In effect, La Pierre is demanding absolutism on his relative terms. For instance, the gun that Founders referred to is a muzzle loader, a musket. At best, you might have a flintlock pistol. Why doesn't he mention that in his "principle"? After all, colonists had to defend their farms against varmints both human and animal, and they seemed to do a pretty good job of surviving. If the purpose of owning a gun is to defend yourself and your family, then it seems to me that mission accomplished there.

Read more »

Defending the indefensible, the NRA blows its load

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The NRA's chief gun fetishist and bullshitter, Wayne LaPierre, was on Meet the Press yesterday and -- surprise, surprise -- objected to any and all gun control efforts. (Watch below.)

He also defended the NRA's "universally panned call for armed guards to be stationed at every school in the country." Because, you know, there's no problem that more guns can't solve.

For once, it does seem that the NRA and gun nuts generally are facing a fight they simply cannot win, a tide of public opinion that will ultimately prevail.

Oh, maybe they'll win in the short term because there are more than enough Republicans in Congress to block meaningful legislation, but it's just so obvious now that they're defending the indefensible and that their extremist absolutism is essentially murderous.

Maybe, sadly, it took the killing of 20 young children in Connecticut to wake everyone up, but maybe that's the silver lining of that horrific tragedy.

Read more »

NRA's absurd scapegoating of violent movies, video games doesn't hold up to scrutiny

By Marc McDonald 

For five days after the horrific bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the National Rifle Association went eerily silent. They slithered under a rock and nobody heard a peep from them until Friday. The cowards even temporarily took down their Facebook page. 

Finally, the NRA's head ghoul Wayne LaPierre spoke up. And in his idiotic, error-filled statement, LaPierre fell back on the one of the gun lobby's oldest scapegoating tactics. He blamed Hollywood for its violent movies, as well as video game makers. He called them "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people." 

Like all the NRA's claims, though, this one doesn't hold up to scrutiny. 

As film director Oliver Stone noted, Hollywood movies are viewed all over the world. And violent video games are played worldwide. 

If one takes a look at Japan's culture and society, one begins to realize how idiotic LaPierre's argument is.

Read more »

Do the math

By Mustang Bobby 

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said on Friday that there should be an armed police officer at every school in the country. Aside from the fact that there have been incidents where there were already people with guns protecting a facility and still a shooter got in and did his carnage — Fort Hood, for example — let's indulge Mr. LaPierre in his masturbatory Rambo fantasy and put one well-trained armed guard at every school in the country. How will he pay for it? The cost would be out of the reach of most school districts, and even if Congress decided to pay for every one of them via a federal grant, it would be a budget buster.

Let's just take a look at one school district. How about one I know pretty well, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools? It is the fourth-largest district in the country, with over 347,000 students. It has 354 schools or facilities with students, so we'll need one guard per school. Let's say that the base average salary of a guard is $75,000. I know that seems a little high for a cop, but we're talking average salary, not starting.

But you just don't pay for the base salary and you're done. There are other costs, such as paying into their retirement account, Social Security and Medicare contributions which the district has to pick up a portion of, contribution to health insurance, and the required payment of workers compensation, liability, and unemployment insurance, all required under contract or state or federal law.


Read more »

A place to start

By Mustang Bobby 

Charlie Pierce has a suggestion on how to institute gun control: go after the companies that make and sell them.

This could be the start of something real — a disinvestment campaign, modeled on the one aimed at companies doing business in South Africa and, later, at the tobacco industry, on the part of police, and fire, and school teachers' unions to remove their money from the marketing end of mass killing. A campaign that would redefine gun violence as a public-health crisis, as David Satcher tried to do years ago, and to redefine it on the balance sheet, where that would really count. This could be the start of holding the people who really make the money accountable for how they make it. You could close the NRA tomorrow, and there'd be another lobbying arm started up by armaments money within the hour. You could shoot Wayne LaPierre to the moon, and there'd be 100 other lobbyists lining up to take his place. Both LaPierre and the NRA serve not their members, but weapons manufacturers. (That's why all those polls about "rank and file" NRA members who support, say, background checks, are worthless. At its top, the organization no more answers to them than it does to the Brady Campaign.) The paranoia stoked by NRA fundraising — which, alas, seems to have worked its dark magic on Adam Lanza's mother — is not directed merely against sensible gun legislation. It's to sell more guns to the people who marinate themselves in that paranoia, so the people who make the guns can make even more money. That's the place you want to paint the bullseye.

This is America, after all: the place where everyone wants to make a buck... and then go out and shoot one.

There will still be days like yesterday

By Mustang Bobby 

We're all familiar with the tiny little fundamentalist Christian group known as Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. They consist mainly of the Phelps family, led by their patriarch, Fred Phelps, and they are most famous for demonstrating at the funerals of dead soldiers killed in the war as well as prominent people, including victims of terrorism, and carrying signs that proclaim GOD HATES FAGS and such gentle comfort. Their belief is that God so hates gays that he is inflicting his wrath on this nation for tolerating their existence that he does such things as kills soldiers for defending America. I don't know if they plan to show up at the funerals for the victims of the shooting in Connecticut, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Several states have written laws to prevent this pathetic little band of misfits from picketing at funerals, and they have also been sued for causing emotional distress. However, the courts have been circumspect about infringing on their right to express their opinions, and they were successful in defending themselves against the lawsuit. The rights of the people to express themselves, no matter how execrable their opinions are, cannot lightly be infringed.

Many if not all other Christian denominations have been swift to condemn the Westboro Baptist interpretation of the Bible, and they are equally horrified to see the name of their God libeled in such a way. Of course, not all Christians believe what they do and it would be unfair to tar them with the broad brush of bigotry and homophobia. And even as there are milder versions of the Phelps theology out there edging into the mainstream, they are still not representative of the vast number of Christians who are loving, kind, gay-friendly, or LGBT themselves.

Read more »