Blowhole

by kara on December 21, 2012

 

Wayne LaPierre thinks that there were 26 kids dead. Not 20 kids and 6 adults trying to protect them. Disengaged, clueless, disrespectful, in his own reality. You would think that the scale of the tragedy would have penetrated, but no. He didn’t even bother to count the numbers.

It’s jaw-dropping – the pretend-pious, blatantly perverted disconnected fake logic.  His starting point is – defend at all cost their position of gun possession. Everything and anything has to start with accommodate that …… never mind the classroom full of little bodies riddled with gunshot holes, and the slain courageous teachers who deserve life one thousand times more than Wayne LaPierre, who will go his grave having done NOTHING of substance, having helped no one.

Blaming the mentally ill, video games (Mortal Kombat, no less, for god’s sake don’t tell them about Call of Duty), and the media and proposing to put armed guards outside kindergartens. That HE incidentally will train (for a fee) and arm (for a fee). Literally Everything he says can be taken apart and discredited. 99.9% of video game players or movie-goers don’t go on murderous rampages, yet after every massacre there is calls for restrictions and censorship. Yet then same people turn around and say that 99.9% of gun owners are responsible, so should be allowed to keep as many weapons without restriction as they like.Let’s not forget that this is the same man who also argued that people on the terrorist watch list should not be banned from buying assault rifles because ‘they hadn’t been convicted of anything’ but couldn’t care less if they were banned from flying.

This whole proposed mental health patient registry is incredibly offensive. The mentally ill are no more likely to commit violent acts than the general population. Why don’t we start a national database of white males in their 20s since they seem to do all the shooting? Personal privacy rights advocates why is it okay to register the mentally ill but not lethal hardware? I have a mental illness of sorts, and I really don’t think I should have to be on some national registry that could easily be used against me in the future. Between this and the “Obama didn’t take your guns for 4 years and extended gun rights because secretly it is all a plot to take your guns” I’m thinking LaPierre opposes stricter mental health background checks for personal reasons. And no we DON’T need more religious rituals at our schools even if some of the people reciting “under God” actually don’t even believe in God (so that we can all feel collectively good about being collectively “good”) AND more people with guns. Everywhere. Forever. This is the solution to every existential/ social/spiritual/emotional/physical problem anyone ever has: religion tropes and GUNS.

The only way to protect ourselves, according to the NRA, is to start preemptively pointing your guns at everyone, everywhere, all the time just in case. Why, it sounds so crazy it must be sane! Sarah Jane Moore tried to assassinate Gerald Ford with a pistol in 1975, but was stopped by an unarmed bystander who grabbed her arm. If he had had a semi-automatic carbine–he could have sprayed the whole crowd and gotten rid of any other potential assassins in the crowd. Reagan and James Brady were shot despite being surrounded by armed secret service guys. Go figure. If you get shot, it’s your own fault because you didn’t have a gun on you, or had one but were not adequately trained to anticipate that some other armed idiot might shoot you. Have you seen footage of the Bank of America robbery? Two heavily armed bank robbers with assault rifles and wearing body armor held hundreds of regular cops at bay for over half an hour. The cops were only able to tackle the gunmen when the robbers ran low on ammunition. It’s like watching Terminator. The bad guys had an arsenal of semiautomatic rifles converted to fire automatically with 75- to 100-round drum magazines and 30-round box magazines, 9mm Beretta Model 92FS semiautomatic pistols, and something called A Bushmaster XM15 E2S “Dissipator” semiautomatic rifle heavily modified into a selective-fire weapon firing from two 100-round “Beta Magazines”.

Wayne LaPierre literally fantasizes about every school looking like a prison camp with machine-gun towers. Imagine the shootout in a school between a deranged, heavily armed gunman in body armor and a low paid, GOP-style (non-unionised), rent-a-cop (this ‘school shield’ system is bound to be something akin to the TSA, but worse, let’s face it). I’m still trying to figure out how LaPierre  thinks his State-budget-slashing buddies in Congress will pay for this, or how turning us into a true jack booted thug police state will make us more free or how a guy with a pistol is gonna really stop a crazy person with an assault rifle. The acceptable risk to protect the 2nd amendment in this fantasty world of their’s is beyond parody.

The sooner the NRA and the Republicans go the way of the dodo, the better off the rest of us will be. I, and a lot of sane Americans have mostly been ignoring the gun nuts ever since W and Wall Street gave us other things to worry about. But now I’m pissed. People understand that the “Tea Party” only speaks for a slim majority, no one wants to pay attention but but we have no choice. After this, that’s all she wrote for the NRA, right? I mean, not even in America can someone reveal themselves to be that insane – while at the same time never seeing the irony of proposing mental health registers to control gun deaths – and still be taken seriously in public discourse. Were not every sing’e Amerians minds blown at this fool’s ‘solution’? It’s breathtaking that someone could be that unaware, that self-involved and that pathologically ideological as to make that statement on (inter)national TV in response to Sandy Hook. It’s like theorising to a drug addict that the cure to his addiction is to keep taking drugs, just more frequently and in bigger quantities.

You know, there was an All in the Family episode where Archie got time on the local TV news to advocate arming everyone on planes to stop hijackings. We laughed and laughed.


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