As I've said repeatedly over the last week, if I thought gun control would be even remotely helpful, I might find it in myself to support it, the obvious constitutional problems aside. But that train left the station well over a century ago. Even if you could stop the production of all American guns tomorrow, there would still be as many as 300 million of them floating around out there. Liberals understand this, they just refuse to be honest about it.
Conservatives (or more exactly, Republicans) have been even worse over the last seven days. They're going out of their way to blame everything but guns and looking for liberal solutions that limit free speech rights and accomplish nothing. It's repugnant and all the proof you need that you shouldn't trust those assholes any more than you trust liberals. At the end of the day, their solutions require just as much big government and primacy of the state over the individual.
Over the last week, I've seen far too many conservatives blame TV, movies, video games, the Internet and even the news media itself. That kind of stupidity and brazen dishonesty is even more dangerous than the most powerful of assault weapons. Don't get me wrong, they still want their guns. In fact, they want more guns out there. The Second Amendment must be protected, even at the expense of the First.
It's also important to remember that most of the outraged voices this week are the same people that believe corporations are people for the purpose of election spending. If that's true (and I don't have any serious philospohical problems with it) it therefore stands to reason that they enjoy the full spectrum of First Amendment rights, including producing brutally graphic movies and video games.
If the sharp curbing of free expression rights,combined with the wholesale arming of the populace produces anything other than Yemen, I'm at a loss to explain what it would be. The American left and right seem to be in agreement that personal freedom has to take it in the nuts and are only arguing over whose will go.
Perhaps the most offensive notion out there is that this is all the fault of the news media. If I understand this assertion properly, it goes as follows: If the news media stops reporting the news, then nobody will get the idea to shoot a whole bunch of folks. The idea is that the desperate, sad and ill among us are looking for some manner of immortality. If they happen to attain that through a measure of infamy, so be it. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
Boiled down, the logic seems to be that if we ignore them, they'll just go away. And if you're a simpleton, you might very well agree.
But why then don't we apply that standard to all bad actors in the world? Wasn't Osama bin Laden granted a measure of fame in the wake of 9/11? Would there have been attempted copycat attacks if we all just agreed not to talk about the big hole in Lower Manhattan? Would rockets stop falling in the suburbs of Tel Aviv if the Israeli media stopped making such a big deal about Hezbollah and Hamas?
The idea that crazy people often do weird shit seems to have escaped everyone. It seems self-evident that they do weird shit precisely because they're crazy, and guns or media have little, if anything, to do with it. But it seems that mine is an increasingly lonely voice. Everybody wants the government to do something, even people who don't naturally trust it to do much at all.
I was actually impressed with the National Rifle Association's ability to keep its mouth shut in the days after Sandy Hook. Not only did they show admirable restraint, it was savvy public relations, which they're not often famous for. For example, the NRA's mouthpiece in chief, Wayne LaPierre responded to the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco by calling government agents "jackbooted thugs," causing lifelong member George H.W Bush to resign in protest.
In keeping a respectful silence, the NRA very well could have gained some goodwill. And they couldn't have that, so they yesterday sent LaPierre out to piss it all away with a presentation so brazenly dishonest and chock full of stupidity that it couldn't possibly be ignored.
Actually, that's not true. Fox News bailed as soon as they understood just how badly Wayne was fucking up the narrative.
That LaPierre believes that the solution to a problem with guns is more guns should surprise no one. After all, the proliferation of weapons is the NRA's raison d'etre, their very bread and butter. But it is just a little counter-intuitive. As the always amazing Michele Catalano said "Next we'll combat the heroin problem in my town by providing the kids with more heroin!" I actually don't agree with that, but it's a great rejoinder.
According to the new official position of the NRA, guns aren't the problem, the media is. And only the government can address that. If the First Amendment has to go to protect the Second, by God, the NRA will be first one to pull the trigger.
In calling for armed cops in every school, LaPierre seems to be calling for a dramatic expansion of the federal government. Most of the examples he cited - airports, the president and Congress - are all protected by federal employees and paid for by Washington.
Let's not pretend that the NRA is a kumbaya, "Up with People" wing of the Democratic Party, okay? These are self-described conservatives. And they're basically proposing the federalization of the school security without a plausible way of paying for it and in direct opposition to decades conservative dogma about the federal role in education.
In fairness, that idea isn't half as fucking dumb as the wholesale arming of teachers. I could be wrong, but I suspect that giving glocks to a bunch of liberal arts majors won't end as well as some folks seem to think it will. Even if it did, it doesn't address the expanding use of body armor in mass shooting incidents since the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America shootout. If it's hard for the cops to take these psychos out, there's no reason to believe that your kid's guidance counsellor is going to have better luck.
This expansion of government also flies in the face of the paranoid and constitutionally unsupported idea that the Second Amendment is necessary because Americans might have to rise up against their government that the NRA is generally supportive of.
Look, you're not rising up against shit, okay? Even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 was unequal to federal might, and the United States didn't have a standing army at the time, let alone drones, Apache helicopters and Ticonderoga class cruisers with Aegis combat systems that can destroy a basketball with a Tomahawk missile from 500 miles away. For all the lunatic romantic remembrances of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it's sort of important to remember which side won those confrontations. If the next 25 most powerful nations can't defeat American military might, why does anyone think that some pissed-off hillbillies and blogger shitheads can?
That's not to suggest that I'm against guns. I'm not. But I'm also not going to look at you with a straight face and suggest that your right to bear arms is more important than anyone else's free speech rights.
Not only does LaPierre say exactly that, he will fight to death for the right of people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms but he wants Grand Theft Auto and a twenty year old Oliver Stone movie made verboten, pronto. There is no other reason to devote that many paragraphs to scapegoating the culture if you don't want action on it. If, as some suggest, that he's only calling for "public shaming," we should take a good long look at how effective that's been against the NRA. Some people are simply biologically without shame.
Here's an interesting test I use to determine if someone is being honest with me. I take note of whether someone holds up individual amendments over the Bill of Rights as a whole. For example, the Second Amendment is pretty meaningless without the Fourth keeping the government from coming to take your guns away. The rest of the document is little more than quaint without the First Amendment.
That's a test that LaPierre and the NRA routinely fails. In a mad and desperate effort to deflect even the tiniest amount of responsibility for gun violence from guns, he throws other freedoms over the side.
Yes, I know that ol' Wayne didn't explicitly call for the censorship or regulation of media. But I can't overlook the fact that he didn't have to. He has no shortage of stooges in Congress and the conservative media that will do it for him. In fact, they've already started.
Always remember that Wayne LaPierre isn't a symbol of freedom; he's a lobbyist. As such, he'll say anything you wind him up to, provided you dangle enough money in front of his snout first. And anyone who doesn't get that is probably too dumb to own a gun in the first place.
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