Don't worry, the Republicans have explained it all for us! Within breathtaking speed, they have found a way to blame the Connecticut tragedy on….Democrats.
Mike Huckabee says this tragedy happened because we've removed God from our schools; anti-gay activist Bryan Fischer said it was because we stopped prayer in our schools (actually it was the Constitution that did that). Rightwing loudmouth Victoria Jackson blamed the massacre on people who are pro-choice -- "when you forget the ten commandments, people, this is what you get!" The Tea Party Nation has declared that those children died because of teachers, “radicals in the classroom”, unions, bureaucracy, and sex in movies; they wish George Zimmerman had been guarding the Sandy Hook school. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson said those children died because of atheists, abortion and gay marriage.
In other words, God ordered these children shot, because he’s mad about Democrats.
And the gun rights people also claim that it's the gun control people who have blood on their hands.
Seriously.
Republicans have been blaming Democrats for things they never did, since there have been Republicans. Newt Gingrich blamed Democrats for that crazy woman who drowned her kids in her car. Back during Bush 41, the Republicans blamed Democrats for everything so often that they joked about it in cartoons. Republicans have repeatedly tried to blame Democrats for their own plan to destroy Medicare, and for the big deficits caused by Bush’s policies. And so on and so on.
So why does the NRA insist on the right to big automatics with big clips?
First, hunting, which is absurd. A big clip auto won’t shoot a deer, it will turn it into Deer Vapor.
Second, home defense. Um, no. First of all, the myth that guns save homeowners from being killed by burglars has no basis in reality: such incidents are so rare they don’t even keep statistics. If burglars had been killing homeowners in large numbers, you can bet your bottom dollar that the NRA would be reminding us of that every waking moment. But it isn’t true. And second of all, even if you do have a legitimate safety concern, you don’t need that big-clip Bushmaster unless the Sinaloa drug cartel is invading your home, in which case you have bigger problems than weaponry.
Third, “tyranny”! The head of Gun Owners of America claims Americans need guns to defend against Big Government, control government, take on government. Folks, if government really does descend into totalitarian tyranny, one of two things will happen: either…
(a) these fat old wheezy gun nuts will try to take on the U.S. Army and lose badly; they couldn’t even manage a shootout with the local police, let alone the army or the young lads of SEAL Team 6, or
(b) the gun nuts will be so attracted to the simplistic demagoguery of the tyrant, that they will be his most enthusiastic supporters; over the years demagogues have found it laughably easy to fool the more-tattoos-than-teeth trailer trash of the far right, with time-tested appeals to fear, hate and intolerance.
Either they will join the tyrant, or be crushed by the tyrant. The probability of these armchair warriors actually overthrowing a dictatorship is exactly zero. And let’s remember also that the probability of a dictatorship in this country is laughably remote: as Jon Stewart pointed out, what rightwing whackaloons call “tyranny”, the rest of us call “losing”. Being forced to pay your taxes to a black president is tyranny, it’s democracy.
In other words, there is no point to allowing the big guns and big clips on our streets.
The gun rights people argue that guns are not only necessary, but a positive good. They say we should be giving guns to all our teachers. Because slinging lead in a room full of children is the way to go. One of the guys who said that is sponsoring a Michigan to allow guns in schools.
The National Review asserts that we’re living under the “almost universally benevolent protection of the Second Amendment”. So exactly how has the Second Amendment helped America? What would America have lost, if there had been no Second Amendment? All I can think of, is a destructive four-year Civil War, and a million avoidable homicides, suicides, accidental deaths, and injuries.
They also say they have the Constitution behind them. Folks, the Constitution says militias are organizations that take orders from the President, and that it is militias who have unlimited gun rights. Militias, not the rest of us. The gun people don’t have the Constitution behind them: they have the Supreme Court behind them, a Court controlled by rightwing whackaloons, as we learned the hard way in 2000.
Some tea-party activists are trying to dodge the issue, by claiming the problem isn’t guns, it’s mental illness. But how do you solve that? Assuming they have no magic formula for banning mental illness, what would their solution be? After 62 massacres in the last 30 years, killing several hundred people, and a million other needless deaths, the American people have proved that they are too crazy-stupid to be trusted with guns. And inevitably it's the crazy-stupid people who are the first in line to buy guns – and they are too many, and too hard to spot. And even when they don’t buy the guns themselves, they seem to have no trouble getting them from friends and family. So rather than indulging in a hopeless effort to deny guns to people who might pull a nutty later on, the obvious answer is to stop these loons from killing people in batches of 10, 20, 30, by getting rid of the rapid-fire and the big clips.
They also say they will destroy anyone who opposes them. The NRA is like Grover Norquist -- political terrorists who control our national policy, but have no accountability for the consequences of the laws they force on the rest of us. Because the rules of democracy apply to everybody but them.
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