Tag Archives: NRA

The Killing Fields

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jonflan911When 9-11 occurred, the Bush White House saw an opportunity to scare folks into supporting the Patriot Act that compromised American freedoms – having nothing to do with national security.

Now that we’ve had this most recent shooting, Trump and his minions are working up alternative arguments, like immigration would make a difference, and talking about domestic terrorism, and giving lip service to mental health. INTENDING – to do nothing – AGAIN – to change our gun laws.

Just wait out the passions – that’s their game – get through August – and nothing will happen – like nothing has happened every time before.

Today, there are reports that we have people running for cover at Times Square because of a back fire.

America is in a panic.

Australia spun on a dime when their national security was at risk. Reform was a nationwide almost overnight phenomenon.

America spins its wheels – no matter the terror, death and destruction.

We have to re-set the gun culture to a base line that may be further reduced.

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Republicans Shut Down Gun Safety Legislative Session

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Richmond_protest

“Moms demand action” drew red-shirted supporters from Lovettsville and across the Commonwealth to convene in Richmond for a special session ordered by Governor Ralph Northam to pass gun safety legislation.

They came in buses and cars on July 9, 2019, the day scheduled for the General Assembly to take action. Continue reading →

THE PRIVATE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS – NONSENSE

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Citizen with an M60

“The notion that registering gun purchases somehow violates the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense,”

so said former Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger. He also said that

“[n]othing outrages me more than the conduct of the National Rifle Association (‘NRA’).”

Former NRA Vice President Neal Knox once said that the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were possibly “part of a conspiracy to enact gun control” and “could have been created for the purpose of disarming the people of the free world.” This past week, the NRA has eclipsed its ordinary standard for bad taste by attacking the President’s children, asking why the federal government provides them Secret Service protection but not other children in our public schools. Anyone want to suggest a distinction that the NRA might understand? Continue reading →

How “gun control” got its start

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He was a large man, wearing a combat-style uniform, beret, and heavy boots. He stood outside the door, watching people entering and exiting. One witness, who had summoned the police, said that the man’s presence made him feel intimidated, a feeling echoed by others in the building. When asked by a reporter what he was doing there, the man replied that he didn’t understand why they were trying to make it look like he was doing something wrong. He was just standing there, he said, serving his community.

Now, when considering that these witnesses felt “intimidated” by a man in a combat-style uniform standing outside their workplace and holding a nightstick, one might wonder what sorts of things other people might have going on in their lives to make them stand outside a building watching people like that?

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Lock ’em up, even if it doesn’t work

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Well, the guns-for-all – some mental health restrictions apply – “thinkers” may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, if they’ve found time to seriously ponder thought control advocacy. An article in today’s Washington Post describes the state of the art in violence prediction. The analysts parse patients into two groups.

There have been numerous efforts to test these violence-predicting tools in recent decades. For example, Monahan and his colleagues incorporated 106 risk factors into a software interview program and administered it to patients being discharged from psychiatric units in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Of those judged to be low-risk by this tool, 90 percent committed no violence over the next six months. Of those judged to be high-risk, 49 percent committed violent acts.

Where does that leave our thought control advocates? Lock up the high-risk group and one innocent is deprived of his/her liberty for each potentially violent offender. Release the low-risk group and 10% are potential violent offenders. The numbers suck. The NRA wants to hand those numbers to government? Seriously? Could it be hyperbole? Maybe “dark political energy” will smooth out the looming gross injustice. Or, maybe, we should send Wayne LaPierre and his defenders to the corner, with a dunce hat, to pout.

Gun control or thought control?

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Pastor Doug Giles, Townhall columnist, and all-around "good guy"

 

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going…and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”

If Goethe were alive today, he might replace “biscuits and cake and the rod” with “guns and ammo and mental illness.” Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, wants taxpayers to fund a “national database of these lunatics,” because “good guys” need biscuits assault weapons and cake thirty-round clips. In addition to blaming the government for letting “these lunatics” out of the nuthouse, the innocent little LaPierre blames the video game makers (who market the guns and ammo he so adores) for gun carnage. The NRA isn’t likely to change their name to the “National Rifle and Friends of Mental Health Association” any time soon. Here’s what LaPierre said about mental health in a Meet the Press interview:

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A Teacher in Every Gun Store

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Teacher, Victoria Soto, 27, misled the gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, told him her children were in the gym, when she had hidden them elsewhere; she died to save her students.

This simple phrase, “A Teacher in every gun store,” was posted on Facebook by a friend.

It was in counterpoint to the crazy idea that we should arm every teacher in every class room, with a PPK or assault rifle, and have a cop in every school – but not every classroom.

Nor should we overlook the “other” substitute initiative for gun reform, that this nation should take a closer look at those who are mentally ill. Unfortunately, we’re talking detection and discrimination, scapegoating really, not about acceptance or treatment.

Consider the fact that Asperger’s Syndrome, a developmental disorder, suffered by our latest horrific shooter, Adam Lanza, is not a disorder associated with violence.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, undeterred by Lanza’s mental state, railed against the nation’s mental health: “The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them.”

Is LaPierre suggesting a policy that every gun owner must undergo a mental examination at the time of a weapon’s purchase or transfer? Hardly!

LaPierre calculated he had to divert the nation from any discussion of true gun reform, with forehead slapping distractions. He also sought to instruct the Republican T-party members in Congress that this stratagem was how to defend gun reforms against those who rebel against the notion that the gunfight at the OK Corral should be the law enforcement model we emulate.

LaPierre railed at the media for its coverage (even as he manipulated the media to cover him), refusing to answer any questions.

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The “culture of life” that kills people

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“It was worse than if the NRA had not spoken at all,” said Gene Grabowski, executive vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based issues management firm that has worked with firearms manufacturers.

Meanwhile, during that curious week of self-imposed silence from the NRA, we’ve heard just about every offensive explanation and excuse imaginable for the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut: The gunman could have his way with the elementary school because it was a “feminized setting” without enough “male aggression” (this ignorant assertion made in the face of the heroic actions of the women who hid children and tried to tackle the gunman); this massacre and others like it are the price we must be willing to pay for the convenience to gun enthusiasts afforded by the “almost universally benevolent” Second Amendment; and of course, there was the predictable ranting from the usual suspects blaming an imaginary “war on Christmas,” imaginary “homosexual agenda,” imaginary “end of school prayer,” etc. But in the discussion of a naked propaganda post that managed to go on and on and on about a sustained, lethal assault upon schoolchildren with a military assault weapon without once using the word “gun,” one commenter takes the prize for disingenuous sanctimony by claiming the atrocity wouldn’t have happened if only, if only, we had a “universal respect for life.”

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