On Friday an executive of the NRA held a press conference which, for many, suggested that either the NRA was loonier than we could even imagine or that it was ridiculous that our government has been run in fear of these weak-assed whores for the gun industry who masquerade as standing up for our right to hunt and plink Necco wafers off a strip of plate molding.
Nation of Change printed a good review of Wayne LaPierre’s embarrassing press conference by simply pointing out a few of the good lines (as if they might go viral?).
- “Gun-free schools zones “tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”
- “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.
- “[V]iolent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.”
- “We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security.”
- “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away?”
- “And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators.”
- “Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Natural Born Killers’ that are aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life.”
- “In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.”
- “Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”
- “Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”
If this country is so inherently violent, it seems to me that the last thing we want to do is allow open access to weapons that kill people. So to help Wayne LaPierre sleep better at night we should pass laws that would greatly restrict access to guns. Forty, fifty years down the line if we discover that the murder rate in the United States didn’t go down when guns were restricted, then we can reconsider.
A Celebration of Reading 