Like a Magic 8 Ball with a single shred of advice floating around its inky interior, the National Rifle Association—one week after a gunman took the lives of 26 people in an elementary school in Connecticut—insisted that firearms are still the best medicine against gun violence.
When all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target
Photo by Riza Liu.
Like a Magic 8 Ball with a single shred of advice floating around its inky interior, the National Rifle Association—one week after a gunman took the lives of 26 people in an elementary school in Connecticut—insisted that firearms are still the best medicine against gun violence.
Before the news from Sandy Hook had time to sink in, I sensed the wagons circling. Zealous Second Amendment champions assumed familiar defensive stances. Gun shops offered teacher discounts and firearm sales surged. The outsized backlash against reason that follows mass shootings in the U.S. culminated in the NRA’s press conference Friday, Dec. 21.
Uncountable numbers of demon-possessed monsters, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre threatened, walk among us and gravitate to our unprotected schoolchildren.
After wagging his finger at the news media, lawmakers and the producers of violent entertainment, LaPierre called on Congress to stop at nothing “to put armed police officers in every school and to do it now.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” LaPierre said, “is a good guy with a gun.”
Senate Democrat Dianne Feinstein wasted no time responding to LaPierre’s atavistic comments by pointing out that two armed law enforcement officials at Columbine High School couldn’t prevent a killing spree that ended 15 lives. The Columbine massacre 13 years ago proved that armed “good guys” don’t always have what it takes to stop deranged gunmen, and don’t deter them, either.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted that the tone-deafness of LaPierre’s extreme position is likely to backfire, dividing sensible gun-owning Americans from the lunatic fringe, thereby greasing the works for new gun laws.
“Trying to prevent shootings in schools without talking about guns,” Schumer said, “is like trying to prevent lung cancer without talking about cigarettes.”
Days after the NRA press conference, LaPierre held steady, refusing to concede the point that there are such things as sensible gun restrictions. Limiting access to assault rifles and banning high-capacity magazines that allow shooters to fire more rounds before having to reload, LaPierre told Meet the Press’ David Gregory, will do nothing to reduce the death toll the next time a person with a gun loses his or her mind and opens fire on innocent people.
Looking at it from a certain angle, in a way, LaPierre is right: Guns aren’t evil. On their own, they can’t kill people. They deserve credit for the assist, though.
Given the choice between running from an assailant armed with a gun or running from an unarmed attacker, LaPierre and those like him would choose the latter. It would be equally easy for him to choose between a gunman with 30 live rounds in his gun and one with only 10.
Aside from whether Operation Kindergarten Cop would protect America’s schoolchildren from the next Sandy Hook tragedy, the plan, at a time of limited budgets and strained resources, would be nigh impossible to implement.
Though LaPierre and other NRA spokesmen retreated from the stage without revealing the cost of their plan or where the money to pay for it would come from, Bloomberg.com did the math and estimated that hiring, equipping and paying 99,000 armed security guards—one for every elementary school in America—would set taxpayers back almost $8 billion.
LaPierre acknowledged in his statement that the federal government can’t afford his plan, so he might as well have suggested that we provide every school-aged child in the country with Kevlar overalls and miniature PASGT helmets.
The NRA’s proposal, while elegant in its simplicity, is so incomplete and full of holes that not even LaPierre himself is addled enough to believe in it. Furthermore, LaPierre’s plan to station an armed policeman in every school ignores the fact that fewer than one-quarter of the more than 150 people who were killed or injured in mass shootings in 2012 were shot on school campuses.
Either the NRA, an organization that spends roughly $20 million annually “defending the U.S. Constitution” has lapsed into senility, or its spokesmen are lying through their teeth.
If they are lying, then this ham-handed press conference represents an intentional last-ditch, greed-fueled effort to cloud the national discussion about gun violence until the anguish of the Sandy Hook shooting fades and outrage subsides.
Several of my friends & I just discussed this article. It has to take the cake for “most ignorant headline” I’ve ever seen.
I think that Nick Meli would beg to differ:
http://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/index.ssf/2012/12/security_guard_said_he_had_rob.html
I fail to see how the Oregon Live article in any way refutes the above essay. Reading the article, I learned that Nick Meli, despite being armed with a gun, and trained to use it properly, was unable to stop a shooting melee happening right before his eyes. Isn’t this just one more example of how extra guns fail to make us safer?
The author of this piece calls himself a college student? Anyone (with an ounce of critical thinking skills) who reads LaPierre’s claim that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun…is a good guy with a gun” should be able to put aside their bias and do five minutes of Google research to see if there’s any evidence to back it up before mocking him for the statement. Here, I’ll get you started:
8/1/1966 UTexas tower shooting:
“Approximately 20 minutes after first shooting from the observation deck, [Charles] Whitman began to encounter return fire from both the police and other armed citizens.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman#Sniper_in_the_tower
10/1/1997 Pearl High School shooting:
“The school’s assistant principal, Joel Myrick, retrieved a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol from his truck and, spotting [gunman Luke Woodham] near the parking lot, shouted for Woodham to stop. Woodham instead got into his mother’s car and tried to escape. Myrick, a U.S. Army Reserve commander, detained Woodham until authorities arrived.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
1/16/2002 Appalachian School of Law shooting:
“According to Bridges: at the first sound of gunfire, he and fellow student Mikael Gross, unbeknownst to each other, ran to their vehicles to retrieve their personally-owned firearms placed in their glove compartments…Bridges and Gross approached Odighizuwa from different angles, with Bridges yelling at Odighizuwa to drop his gun. Odighizuwa then dropped his firearm and was subdued by several other unarmed students…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shooting
December 2007 New Life Church shooting:
“[Jeanne] Assam hid and inched toward the gunman, Matthew Murray, as dozens of terrified worshipers fled. She waited until he got close enough, revealed herself, aimed her pistol and fired. Murray dropped to the ground.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/dec/11/nation/na-shoot11
March 2012 South Side Freewill Baptist Church shooting:
“[Jesse] Gates kicked open the side door of the sanctuary and entered with the shotgun, pointing it at the pastor and congregation. Church members, including Aaron Guyton, a concealed weapons permit holder, acted quickly. Aaron Guyton held Gates at gunpoint, as church members Jesse Smith and Leland Powers held him on the floor and waited for deputies to arrive.”
http://www.goupstate.com/article/20120325/ARTICLES/120329781/1112
April 2012 Destiny Center Church shooting:
“The gunman was shot by his cousin, an off-duty Denver police officer who was attending the service.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/police-congregation-likel_n_1446969.html
4/26/2012 Smith’s store stabbing:
“Gun carrying man ends stabbing spree at Salt Lake grocery store”
http://www.abc4.com/content/about_4/bios/story/conceal-and-carry-stabbing-salt-lake-city-smiths/NDNrL1gxeE2rsRhrWCM9dQ.cspx#.UA3BQ5iNMfH.facebook
August 2012 Peach House RV Park shooting:
Stopped by armed citizen (including saving the life of a cop who was pinned and taking fire from a gunman).
http://www.guns.com/texas-gun-owner-shoot-out-10236.html
12/11/2012 Clackamas Town Center shooting:
“Nick Meli, a concealed carry permit holder, drew his Glock 22, and took aim at Roberts but did not fire since there was an innocent person behind Roberts. Meli asserts that Roberts saw him, and that this may have contributed to Roberts’ decision to commit suicide.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clackamas_Town_Center_Shooting
Do you read any of the articles you post? Setting aside the issue of whether or not these cherry picked cases are outliers, they relate stories of citizens using handguns to abort criminal activity. Handguns. Not assault rifles. No one on any side of the debate has suggested eliminating ALL guns in this country. But maybe folks would have a better chance of halting more of these killing sprees if the potential murderer weren’t armed with military style weaponry.
Whenever a gun is present at the scene of any crime, the only solution liberal legislators can envision is restricting the rights of the uninvolved.
The involved are the mentally ill, untreated and the ACLU insists on ‘defending’ their rights to continue to suffer without help.
Solving a problem, any problem, requires focusing on the causes, and not using tragedy to further an agenda of controlling those who are already abiding by the laws and NOT causing the problems.
It’s very easy to dismiss perpetrators of gun violence as mentally ill. But what do we mean when we say “mentally ill”? Obviously, in retrospect, after a person has committed a heinous act, it’s easy to look back and see the warning signs, but those same warning signs are often present in persons who never suffer a fully psychotic break.
The fact that these episodes continue to surprise us points to the difficulty in guessing, before the act, who is going to commit a crime. Dividing society into “good guys and bad guys” skips over the fact that until these atrocities happen the people who commit them are just people. Does it enhance our freedom to grant to authorities the right to decide who among us qualifies as a “good guy”? I think that’s terrifying.
The angry responses to this article should remind us all that EACH OF US HAS OUR OWN POINT OF VIEW. These shootings happen in part because EVERYONE thinks THEY are the good guy.
Tens of millions of Americans have reflexively purchased firearms for themselves in the last two months – two record months in a row. It may surprise you to learn that the NRA, GOA, etc. are some of the few “interest groups” that directly speak for the concerns of individual Americans. “The gun lobby” didn’t rush out and buy up guns to push the numbers up, nor did they “scare” anyone else into doing so. Americans who choose to defend themselves can smell Obama’s breeze just fine without the NRA telling them what’s up.
Also, to illustrate the “power” and “influence” of the NRA: they spent $11 million on the 2012 election. Big Labor spent over $400 million. What makes “the gun lobby” powerful is not its Capitol Hill presence, but what it represents: millions of individual Americans who know full well why we have a Second Amendment. And it ain’t for deer hunting or target shooting.
The 2nd amendment may indeed have been drafted with the intent of providing citizens with the power to maintain arms for purpose of overthrowing a potentially corrupt government. Of course, the government at that time didn’t have an air force. Or armored humvees. Do you really think assault rifles represent a significant check upon the government power?
If we really want a 2nd amendment to protect our right to challenge the government, than we’re going to need a citizenry that is MUCH better armed. We’re going to need surface to air missiles, rocket launchers, and more than a few tanks. While we’re at it, air support would help too. And why is it that only the fed has a nuclear arsenal? Shouldn’t each state have its own?
Alternatively, to maintain our 2nd amendment rights, what we need to do is disarm the federal government, removing any of their weaponry that impairs our right to citizen revolt.
So, if an AR-15 won’t protect us from our government: why do we have them?