They called
this appearance a press conference, but the NRA guy, Wayne LaPierre, ran off
without taking any questions. Here are the questions I would have asked.
First, Mister
LaPierre, as Daily Kos pointed out, the NRA Board of Directors includes Ted
Nugent, Oliver North, John Bolton, Grover Norquist, Chuck Norris, and Larry
Craig the pedophile bathroom stalker. These are the guys you chose to be the
well-scrubbed reassuring public face of your group, and even these guys are
people with a track record of saying and doing things that are batshit crazy. They
openly hate blacks, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs,
environmentalists. In other words, the loony wing of the GOP. And
overwhelmingly white and male (just like a lot of our mass shooters). If you’re
pushing to retain your rights to all these weapons and even add bigger and more
destructive guns, don’t you think you should try a little harder to hide the
fact that even your leaders are mentally unbalanced and that you hate the rest
of us with the heat of a thousand suns? The confluence of crazy GOP politics,
hate, guns, and mental instability makes us a little nervous.
Next, one of
your board members is Ronnie Barrett, who developed a 50-caliber rifle that can
pierce police armor and shoot down aircraft. It’s the perfect tool for
terrorists, and we know this because the Branch Davidians used this fire power
in the Waco siege, to such effect that even the army’s Bradley fighting
vehicles didn’t have enough armor to withstand it. Has it occurred to you, that
you people are the greatest possible friend for terrorists who want to attack
us without worrying about law enforcement? Imagine terrorists sitting alongside
a dozen U.S. airport runways with these weapons.
Next, do you
realize that your membership overall is becoming even more unstable? More and
more, guns are being concentrated in the hands of crazy people. Overall, the
number of homes with guns in them has dropped shockingly, from 54 percent of
U.S. homes to only 32. But the number of guns overall is spiking upward,
because the shrinking number of gun nuts are buying more and more guns, because
they are more and more paranoid. Statistically, the typical gun owner is white,
over 50, a rural southern conservative Republican, who has a high school
diploma at best, and who doesn’t make much money – but is spending thousands
and thousands of dollars he doesn’t really have, to load up on racks and racks
of guns. Apocalypse preppers, men who await the rapture, outright paranoids,
secessionists, lone wolves, self-appointed militiamen, people who don’t fit in
with today’s America, or who refuse to try. Angry, frightened, alienated, listening
less to the voices of reason and listening more to each other, or to the voices
in their heads, or to Rush. And when the
Sandy Hook tragedy happened – something they helped create – they reacted by
buying even more guns. A Death Spiral of Fear. And even when guns aren’t
involved, there’s trouble—like the guy who watched a bunch of anti-Muslim stuff
on Fox News and then drank a load of beer and burned down a mosque. Does this growing
armed-and-crazy dynamic bother you at all?
Next, what is
the NRA going to do further down the road? Your core of crazy angry old white
guys is going to age off the system. The number of people who agree with your
whackaloon beliefs is dropping. Eventually the GOP will return to sanity and
they will be less reliable as your ally. The Democratic party, sick of being
used as a punching bag, is growing some cojones, and in four years you won’t be
able to use the scary black President to round up new recruits. America has
tried things your way, with few gun controls, and we’re losing 80 dead per day
– the national backlash is already underway. And your contemptible effort to
recruit children is facing a backlash too, after Sandy Hook. So how are you
going to survive the next few decades?
Next, you
keep quoting the Constitution, but have you actually read it, and do you know
how it was written? After the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers decided
that rather than keep the Continental Army, they would disband it and just rely
on state militias. Shortly thereafter they wrote the Second Amendment, allowing
those state militias to keep their muskets, but decreeing elsewhere in the
Constitution, Article 2 Section 2, that this distinction only belonged to
actual state militias which take orders from the President. Guns rights weren’t
intended for everybody, gun rights weren’t for nonmilitary purposes such as
hunting (and people don’t really hunt for their dinners anymore anyway), and it
wasn’t intended as a blank check to acquire any weapon you wanted (i.e. John
Adams didn’t have a cannon on his front lawn). The founders did not embrace
your notion that guns in the hands of common men keep
America free: they insisted that guns in
the hands of properly-led professionals keep America free. The founders had
a deep mistrust of the common man, expressed over and over in the Federalist
Papers: that’s why, elsewhere in the Constitution, they put many filters
between the people and political power, refusing to pass laws by referenda,
using the Senate to prevent popular sentiment from leading to foolish
legislation, and protecting unpopular minority views from being trampled by the
mob. The founders did NOT want to rely on the man on the street to protect
freedom. So…as we discuss the Second Amendment ad nauseam, can we talk about
the rest of the history too?
Next, can you explain why states with
stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence, and why
countries with gun controls don’t kill 80 people a day like we do? Since you
keep asserting that guns keep people safe.
Next. can you
start getting serious about gun locks? For every time a gun is used in the home
for a legally justifiable shooting or self-defense, there are 22 incidents of
homicides, attempted suicides, assaults and accidental shootings. So when you
buy that gun, the odds are it will be used on your or your kids, not some
boogeyman. So can we start locking up our guns? Or better yet, not keep them in
the home at all?
Next, you
complained today that we need guns for protection because federal prosecutions
for gun crimes have dropped by 40 percent. Um, isn’t that because your
Republican pals have used legislation to gut ATF? Maybe we won’t need to sling
lead at criminals ourselves, if the people who are actually trained to do that
have proper funding and support?
Next, can we
dispense with the pledges and oaths? Our members of Congress swear a very clear
oath:
“I do solemnly swear that I will
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this
obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and
that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I
am about to enter: So help me
God.”
In other words, our representatives
swear to uphold their Constitutional duties, without any reservations or
asterisks regarding any other oath they swore to. But you guys keep making them swear other
oaths too: you make them promise to stop anyone from even talking about gun
laws. Your board member Grover Norquist made a whole army of politicians swear
an oath never to raise any taxes, regardless of the financial situation. Your
pals in the Club For Growth swore in a bunch of hard-core tea-party politicians
too, and ruthlessly exterminated any politician who defied their demand for
political purity. So we have a whole lot of our elected officials, who aren’t
working for the American people, to whom they are sworn. You guys are forcing
them to ignore or violate their oath of office. So, someday when you’ve wreaked
enough damage on the country, can we have our congressmen back? Can we have our
democracy back? It would be nice.
And finally,
Mister LaPierre, speaking of mental illness -- do you still believe that policemen
are jackbooted thugs, that Bill Clinton deliberately fostered violence so he
could ban your guns, that the UN will take your guns, and that Obama has spent
a lifetime undermining gun rights and is still plotting to take your guns and
“all is lost” if he wins? Have you talked to a professional about paranoid
personality disorder? They make breakthroughs in medication and therapy every
year. We can help you!
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