Tag Archives: Wayne LaPierre

The NRA is nothing more than a lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers…

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…and the elected GOP establishment is nothing more than their personal representatives.

Adolphus Busch IV requested the NRA immediately cancel his lifetime membership,  one day after the U.S. Senate rejected a bill that would have expanded background checks on guns:

“…One only has to ask why the NRA reversed its original position on background checks. Was it not the NRA position to support background checks when Mr. LaPierre himself stated in 1999 that NRA saw checks as ‘reasonable’? [...]

I am simply unable to comprehend how assault weapons and large capacity magazines have a role in your vision. The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established. Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.

One only has to look at the makeup of the 75-member board of directors, dominated by manufacturing interests, to confirm my point. The NRA appears to have evolved into the lobby for gun and ammunition manufacturers rather than gun owners.”

(h/t wilwheaton)

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via sandandglass

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jetgirl78: “I’ve heard some say the blocking the step would be a victory. My question is victory for who? Victory for what? All that happened today it was the preservation of the loophole that lets dangerous criminals buy guns without a background check. That didn’t make our kids safer.”

jetgirl78: “I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced. A prop, somebody called them. Emotional blackmail, some outlets said. Are they serious? Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue?”

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“I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown, or any other shooting,” Davis said. “I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else. Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss. I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is just afraid — they’re terrified of these victims.”

“I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘go to hell,’” he added.

Source via sandandglass

Newtown and gun control vs. the NRA and gun deaths: 90% vs. 10% of America

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image liberalsarecool

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The Newtown killer fired 155 bullets, murdering 20 children and six teachers in all of five minutes.

  • 155 bullets in five minutes.
  • Not on a battlefield — inside a school.
  • This is what Republican lawmakers are protecting.

(via inothernews)

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“Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.” — President Barack Obama, 3/28/2013.

President Barack Obama Thursday urged supporters to use the next 10 days to pressure lawmakers to back sweeping new gun control legislation, repeatedly invoking the Newtown massacre in his most aggressive call to action in recent weeks.

“We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and to make sure what we said wasn’t just a bunch of platitudes,” Obama said during an event that featured the mothers of children who have died due to gun violence.

Obama called on backers to attend town hall meetings and other events during the remainder of Congress’ Easter Recess and press lawmakers, particularly those who have not backed a universal background check system, on why. “If they’re not part of that 90% [who support universal checks] … then you should ask them why not? Why are you part of the 10%?”

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FIND & CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES:

Senators of the 113th Congress — Sort by: Name |  State |  Party

House Representatives of the 113th Congress — Sort by: State | Name

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One Nation Under The Gun: Thousands Of Gun Deaths Since Newtown

A little more than three months after Newtown, there have been 2,244 [gun deaths].

Two thousand, two hundred and forty-four deaths in about three months.

Click here for an interactive map of those who have died.

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Adam Lanza, mom had NRA certificates – The NRA is proud to count you a member or supporter right up UNTIL you shoot up a kindergarten classroom (or other public place)

The NRA pushed back on an association with the Lanzas later on Thursday. “There is no record of a member relationship between Newtown killer Adam Lanza, nor between Nancy Lanza, A. Lanza or N. Lanza with the National Rifle Association,” the organization said in a statement. “Reporting to the contrary is reckless, false and defamatory.”


From Dec/2012 search warrant of the Lanza’s home

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Conn. senators demand NRA ‘cease and desist’ making robo-calls to Newtown residents

Wayne LaPierre Jr., Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Rifle Association speaks at its members annual meeting during its national convention in St. Louis on Saturday.
image: CHRISTIAN GOODEN/AP

Residents of Newtown say they have been r receiving automated messages from the NRA, which is led by Wayne LaPierre Jr.

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Arsenal of Guns, Ammo, Knives Found in Lanza Home

The three guns that Adam Lanza brought with him to Sandy Hook Elementary school in December were just the tip of the iceberg. According to search warrants unsealed for the first time this morning, FBI investigators found a veritable arsenal inside the Lanza home, including four more guns, well over 1,600 rounds of ammo and numerous high-capacity magazines, three samurai swords, a six-foot spear, and a small collection of knives with blades as long as twelve inches.

See images of some of the items seized on December 2012 warrant: 

Continue reading →

There’s a sucker born every minute and Wayne LaPierre needs them to join the NRA

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Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, wrote an incredible op-ed published by the Daily Caller, after President Obama’s called for a vote on proposed gun safety legislation in his SOTU speech.

TPM: “LaPierre detailed in his op-ed the scary situations in which Americans will need guns to protect themselves, including ‘terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.’”

Here’s a list (which I’ve helpfully annotated):

  • Latin American drug gangs (i.e. brown skin threat… enough said?)
  • Hurricanes, and other natural disasters: (quote by LaPierre, demonstrating that he’s now completely off his meds: “After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia…”)
  • Riots brought on by financial collapse: (No one will laugh at your stockpiles of gold and survival seeds now…)
  • Terrorists: (Or turrists… fightin’ the war on turr!)

Hey, remember 9-11? What if all the good guys in the WTC had been armed! is all LaPierre is saying.

What other dystopian hellscapes did LaPierre not describe? Aliens and zombies. Obviously, he didn’t want to insult his NRA members. Conversely in any of the scenarios above, who would LaPierre’s personal bodyguards be protecting him from? Yep, his well-armed NRA members.

 

When Wayne LaPierre became a ‘dark joke’ at NRA headquarters

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LaPierre did not come from gun culture. He wasn’t a hunter, a marksman, a military man or a Second Amendment activist. “He’s not a true believer,” says NRA biographer Osha Gray Davidson. “He’s the first NRA chief you can say that about.” According to NRA legend, LaPierre is actually a menace with a gun. NRA’s PR team once thought it would be sexy to film LaPierre at a firing range. “It was a nightmare,” an NRA staffer told Davidson. LaPierre was aiming downrange for the camera when an engineer called for a sound check. To answer the man, LaPierre swung around, but he failed to lower his rifle, aiming it directly at the engineer – before someone took the gun away from LaPierre. The incident, terrifying at the time, became a dark joke at NRA headquarters. Staffers behind on their projects were threatened that they’d have to “go hunting with Wayne.” (The NRA’s press office did not reply to Rolling Stone inquiries.) — The NRA vs. America | Rolling Stone

Fox’s Chris Wallace to NRA’s Wayne LaPierre: “That’s ridiculous and you know it, Sir!”

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“The most basic right is to protect yourself. If you limit the American public’s access to [assault weapons] semi-automatic technology, you limit their ability to survive.” — Wayne LaPierre, on Fox News Sunday, arguing that banning assault weapons limited the ‘ability to survive’ and that high-capacity magazines should not be outlawed because women need more bullets.

Paul Krugman on ABC’s This Week: “The NRA is now revealed as an insane organization, What strikes me is we’ve actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people and we’ve seen certainly Wayne LaPierre and some of these others… It’s bizarre. They have this vision that we’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ movie and that nothing can be done about it, that America cannot manage unless everybody’s prepared to shoot intruders, that — the idea that we have a police forces that provides public safety is somehow totally impractical, despite the fact that, you know, that is, in fact, the way we live.”

Think Progress: During a heated exchange with NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre on Sunday, [Fox host Chris Wallace] played a clip of a now infamous NRA ad criticizing Obama for relying on Secret Service to guard his children and asked if the organization believed that every child in America faces a threat similar to that of the Obama kids. LaPierre said that they do, leading Wallace to forcefully push back against the gun chief, saying, “that’s ridiculous and you know it, Sir!”

Daily Intelligencer: Wallace then asked LaPierre, who showed up to the Fox News studio with armed guards, whether he counted as “an out-of-touch elite, because you have security.” LaPierre skirted the issue, explaining that, “We’ve had all kinds of threats coming to us. I don’t deny anybody the right to security when they need it. What I am saying is, it’s ridiculous, Chris, for all the elites and all the powerful and privileged, the titans of industry to send their kids to schools where there is armed security, to have access to semi-automatic technology.”

TPM: LaPierre argued that background checks were ineffective, possibly part of a government plot against gun owners, and not a real legislative option because of a powerful “mental health lobby.” He noted that the NRA used to support universal checks but said special interests surrounding mental health and privacy had derailed the effort and led to NRA leaders throwing in the towel. “The instant check was actually the NRA’s proposal. We offered it as an amendment to the Brady Bill. And I’ve been in this fight for 20 years. We supported it. We put it on the books. But I have finally become convinced after fighting to get the mental records computerized for 20 years and watching the mental health lobby, the HIPAA laws, the AMA oppose it, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said.

Bob Cesca: The gun control advocacy group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, paid for a 30 second ad to run during the Super Bowl, using Wayne LaPierre’s unearthed statements on universal background checks:  

“We think it’s reasonable to provide mandatory, instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere, for anyone.” — Wayne LaPierre, public testimony from 1999.

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Why the change? What does the NRA stand to lose with instant background checks and closing loopholes, like unchecked gunshow sales? As with most things in America, follow the money:

Tim Dickerson | Rolling Stone: “The shift in LaPierre’s rhetoric underscores a radical transformation within the NRA. Billing itself as the nation’s “oldest civil rights organization,” the NRA still claims to represent the interests of marksmen, hunters and responsible gun owners. But over the past decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. “When I was at the NRA, we said very specifically, ‘We do not represent the fi rearm industry,’” says Richard Feldman, a longtime gun lobbyist who left the NRA in 1991. “We represent gun owners. End of story.” But in the association’s more recent history, he says, “They have really gone after the gun industry.”

“Today’s NRA stands astride some of the ugliest currents of our politics, combining the “astroturf” activism of the Tea Party, the unlimited and undisclosed “dark money” of groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, and the sham legislating conducted on behalf of the industry through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. “This is not your father’s NRA,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog. Feldman is more succinct, calling his former employer a “cynical, mercenary political cult.”

“The NRA’s alignment with an $11.7 billion industry has fed tens of millions of dollars into the association’s coffers, helping it string together victories that would have seemed fantastic just 15 years ago. The NRA has hogtied federal regulators, censored government data about gun crime and blocked renewal of the ban on assault weaponry and high-capacity magazines, which expired in 2004. The NRA secured its “number-one legislative priority” in 2005, a law blocking liability lawsuits that once threatened to bankrupt gunmakers and expose the industry’s darkest business practices. Across the country, the NRA has opened new markets for firearms dealers by pushing for state laws granting citizens the right to carry hidden weapons in public and to allow those who kill in the name of self-defense to get off scot-free.”

NRA’S Newtown ad campaign: BUY MORE GUNS! 

Wednesday’s selections from the annals of ‘Republicans are terrible people’

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Jezebel - After tons of outrage over her horrendous bill that would make rape victims criminals if they sought an abortion, because they’d be  ”tampering with evidence,” New Mexico Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R-Dingbat) clarified: House Bill 206 isn’t meant to target victims of sexual assault but to discourage rapists. She’s revised the language so it’s clear that abortion providers would be penalized, not rape survivors. — You’re probably thinking: how does punishing 1) a woman who was raped and impregnated or 2) a doctor who performs an abortion for her actually “discourage” rapists? You’re right – it doesn’t. Brown is still a idiot (or she thinks we are).

It’s back! The Republican-mandated invasive transvaginal ultrasound has returned in Arkansas (they never stop trying), where Sen. Jason Rapert (yes! Rapert was his name-o!) is hiding the ultrasound requirement in … yet another “fetal heartbeat” anti-abortion bill: Spread ‘Em, Ladies: Rapert Toughens Anti-Abortion Bill. The new Rapert bill would prohibit an abortion if a heartbeat is detected, a limitation that moves the potential prohibition in Arkansas law to the 5th week of pregnancy, far beyond the pre-viability protection period that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld… – Charles Johnson

Tennessee State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) on Tuesday defended his proposal to tie a family’s welfare benefits to their children’s academic success. [...] Under current law, parents can lose up to 20 percent of their benefits from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program if a child does not attend school. Campfield’s bill would increase the penalty to 30 percent and require children to make “satisfactory academic progress” in school. – Raw Story

Phillip Walker Sailors was charged on Sunday with the murder of Rodrigo Abad Diaz. A 69-year-old war veteran and former missionary was arrested over the weekend on the suspicion of killing a 22-year-old Cuban immigrant who mistakenly arrived in his driveway because of faulty GPS directions. [...] Diaz tried to turn the car around to leave, but Sailors fired another shot, striking the immigrant on the left side of the head. The group, which included a 15 and an 18 year old, said that Sailors held them at gunpoint until police arrived. - Raw Story

A top Hispanic Republican advocacy group co-chaired by Jeb Bush has list of “messaging dos and don’ts for immigration reform,” they say: Don’t use phrases like “send them all back” – Daily Kos

In light of Paul Ryan‘s newfound rediscovered appreciation for the spending sequester’s automatic defense and domestic cuts, let’s take a trip back in time to four months ago when Ryan was making the case during the 2012 vice presidential debate that the sequester’s potential spending cuts emboldened the terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Responding to a question about Mitt Romney’s rash response to the attack, Ryan said: “[...] And we should not be imposing these devastating defense cuts, because what that does when we equivocate on our values, when we show that we’re cutting down on defense, it makes us more weak. It projects weakness. And when we look weak, our adversaries are much more willing to test us. They’re more brazen in their attacks, and are allies are less willing to…” And with those ellipses Vice President Joe Biden could not take any more of Ryan’s nonsense. He interrupted Ryan, and said that Ryan’s statement was—you guessed it—”a bunch of malarkey.” – DailyKos

Huffington Post - Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has upped his already harsh rhetoric against outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, claiming that she “got away with murder”… “I haven’t forgotten about Benghazi. Hillary Clinton got away with murder, in my view,” Graham said on Fox News Monday evening, speaking to Greta Van Susteren. “She said they had a clear-eyed view of the threats. How could you have a clear-eyed view of the threats in Benghazi when you didn’t know about the ambassador’s cable coming back from Libya?” — And I’m quite certain Ms Graham must have been equally upset about the revelation of the “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” memo that George W. Bush shrugged off in August of 2001 at his ranch in Crawford. Or when, 10 years ago this week, George W. told us all in his SOTU that Saddam Hussein had WMD in the form of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent!, mobile biological weapons labs!, nuclear capability! – and worse, Hussein was seeking uranium from Africa! We invaded Iraq 51 days later and now, 10 years and counting, and after hundreds of thousands of deaths and an enormous cost to our nation’s treasury, we all know it was a manufactured lie. 

Dick Cheney may have accidentally shot a man in the face while he was vice president, but that didn’t stop Fox News from flying to Nevada to get his advice on recently-proposed gun control laws. Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins caught up with Cheney over the weekend at the Safari Club International convention for gun owners and manufacturers, where the former vice president and his daughter, Liz, participated in a discussion about gun rights and the realism of torture in the film “Zero Dark Thirty.” – Raw Story

There’s no point in pursuing universal background checks for firearms purchases, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre plans to tell the Senate today, because bad guys will get guns anway. LaPierre is among those scheduled to tesify at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s gun violence hearing Wednesday. The NRA sent out his testimony Tuesday. LaPierre once again plans to tout the NRA’s call for armed guards in every school as well as the group’s call for loosen privacy laws the group says keep mental health records from being included in the extisting background check system. But when it comes to expanding background checks to cover all firearms transactions, LaPierre will tell the Senate there’s little point. - TPM

Neil Heslin, of Shelton, holds a portrait of himself and his son, Jesse Lewis, one of the children killed in the Sandy Hook School shooting, during testimony before the Gun Violence Prevention Working Group at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford on Monday, January 28, 2012. Photo: Brian A. Pounds / Connecticut PostConnecticut Post - Neil Heslin, holding a photo of his slain 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, asked why Bushmaster assault-style weapons are allowed to be sold in the state. “There are a lot of things that should be changed to prevent what happened,” said Heslin… “That wasn’t just a killing, it was a massacre,” said Heslin, who recalled dropping off his son at Sandy Hook Elementary school shortly before Lanza opened fire. “I just hope some good can come out of this.” He asked the crowd why assault weapons should not be banned. …The Connecticut Post put the number of hecklers at “as many as a dozen.” — Watch the video below where he asks his question and the pro-gun crowd is silent at first… then, like brain-wiped, well-programmed drones, they’re simply impelled to screech and howl their meaningless NRA propaganda like,”The Second Amendment!” and “The Second Amendment shall not be infringed!” These soulless bastards just can’t let it go, not even once, not even for a man whose precious 6-year-old son was mowed down in a kindergarten classroom with 19 other children in a hail of bullets. The video starts at his question / their response at 13:29:

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Think Progress – When the Senate passed the long-delayed $50.5 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package Monday, 36 Republicans voted against the bill. But of the 32 no-votes from Senators who are not brand-new members, at least 31 came from Republicans who had previously supported emergency aid efforts following disasters in their own states. [...] The “hypocritical” list includes:

1. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH): Requested disaster aid after Hurricane Sandy.
2. John Barrasso (R-WY), Republican Policy Committee Chair: Requested disaster aid after flooding.
3. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Republican Conference Vice Chair: Demanded the Senate be called back from recess to pass disaster aid during a drought and boasts: “When a disaster surpasses the ability of states and communities to rebuild, Senator Blunt believes the federal government should prioritize spending to help the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted. During his time in the Senate, he has fought tirelessly to ensure that Missouri gets its fair share of those federal resources specifically dedicated to disaster recovery.”
4. John Boozman (R-AR): Requested disaster aid after snow storms in January 2013.
5. Richard Burr (R-NC): Requested disaster aid after severe storms.
6. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): Requested disaster aid after flooding.
7. – 31. Read more…

Screenshot of names of senators who voted no on Sandy relief bill.

 

The farcical self-pity of Wayne LaPierre and the NRA

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Click here for things LaPierre didn’t blame for mass murder in America, and click here for the weirdly outdated and little-known things he did blame.

Igor Volsky: Only gun owners and gun lobbyists — who have spent years easing gun regulations across the country — were spared any responsibility.

Lawyers, Guns & Money: “What if…“when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security?” asked Wayne LaPierre earlier today. We don’t know, to be honest.  But we do know that on April 20, 1999, a “uniformed community resource officer”, in this case a trained Sheriff’s deputy, was armed and on duty at Columbine High School. An honest to goodness, qualified, “good guy with a gun”.”

Josh Marshall: “In LaPierre’s mind the main victim of all this appears to be the NRA. But I want to set that aside for a moment and focus on one part of LaPierre’s statement — where he seems to be endorsing what amounts to ‘Prepper-ism’. We wrote about it today — the movement that Nancy Lanza was apparently a part of, that believes in storing supplies and guns for some inevitable collapse of civilization when it will be every man for himself.

“LaPierre referenced this line at least a couple times: ‘The fact is this. That wouldn’t even begin to address the much larger, more lethal criminal class, killers, robbers, rapists, gang members, who have spread like cancer in every community across our nation. Meanwhile, while that happens, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40% to the lowest levels in a decade. So now due to a declined willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent 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 have got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.’”

Charles Pierce: “You have to give Wayne credit. He didn’t cut the whiskey with water. We need more guns in schools. Gun laws don’t work, not even registration, but we should register all the mentally ill, because the mentally ill don’t have a few million dollars and a lobbyist like Wayne LaPierre dedicated to gutting the law that would register them. The media should stop lying and being ignorant and engaging in a massive cover-up of the existence of Kindergarten Killers. Congress should immediately empower retired cops and firemen and put armed guards in every American school, although Wayne doesn’t know fk-all how we’ll pay for it, but, boy, those guys are really brave. Guns don’t kill people. Deranged people kill people. “Bad guys” kill people. Grand Theft Auto kills people. American Psycho kills people. (Lock up Christian Bale, especially now that the Dark Knight cycle is over.) “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

“[...] And there you have it. For all the hopeful rhetoric expended over the past week about how this might actually be a “tipping point” for the NRA, the organization is as dead set against rational gun laws as it was a week ago Friday. It is not going to soften its stand on militarized civilian weaponry, or large-quantity magazines. There was no mention yesterday of background checks, or closing the gun-show loophole, or any of those other “sensible” regulations that so many people told me for a week that the “great majority” of NRA members actually would support. That may be true, but it’s also been rendered utterly irrelevant in the light of what the organization’s leadership said yesterday. They have their plan, and its about more guns, period. The rest is an exercise in the same distraction and misdirection that the NRA has used, time and time again, after every one of the mass shootings of the past two decades. Now the distraction and misdirection is a little more detailed, and they have a new pitchman selling it, but it is clear that the NRA has no intention of cooperating in any plan going forward from the Connecticut school shooting that has anything to do with registering or limiting America’s firearms…”

Op X: “People cite the 2nd Amendment as their crutch, pleading a need to stay armed against a potentially tyrannical government (as if it was 1795, musket vs. musket). As much as your Bushmaster, .50 Caliber Desert Eagle and your Sig Sauer are well oiled, locked and loaded, somehow I don’t think they’d stand up to an A-10 Warthog, an F-15 Strike Eagle or an F/A-18 Super Hornet. They’d have a bit of trouble with an M1 Abrams Tank, or a nuclear submarine for that matter. Anticipating this argument, gun owners pirouette to the belief of a stronger likelihood of being wrongfully attacked by local authorities – police, sheriffs, etc. Police who they believe they could go toe-to-toe with in having similar armament. This sentiment coming from the same inquiring minds who cry “States Rights!”, yet it’s the local authorities who will be coming for them.

“Any way you slice it, the arguments for guns are simpleton, brow-beating bullshit projected onto us by people with inferiority complexes. We’re left trying to reason with small-minded bullies with low self-esteem who find strength in menacing others because they own a gun.”

Think Progress: “In March 1995, LaPierre sent a fundraising letter to 3.5 million NRA members calling federal law enforcement agents “jack-booted government thugs” and arguing that “in Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” President George H.W. Bush resigned his membership in protest and LaPierre was forced to apologize.”

Michael Bloomberg: “Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.”

  
  
  
  

via ollebosse

The best reason the NRA is usually silent after mass shootings: Wayne LaPierre

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But don’t hate the messenger, hate the lobby and the laws it creates:

The Washington Post: In his first extensive public remarks since the mass shooting at a Connecticut school last Friday, the head of National Rifle Association on Friday called for schools to be armed with police officers in an effort to reduce violent outbreaks like the one that took place last Friday. “The only thing that stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” NRA President Wayne LaPierre said at a press conference in Washington. LaPierre also called on Congress to act immediately ”to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school in this nation.” [...] “Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them … in doing so they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk,” said  LaPierre, the head of the nation’s largest gun rights group.

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Putting a Police Officer In Every School Would Cost At Least $5.5 Billion a Year: According to the National Center for Education Statistics there are 98,817 K-12 schools in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says cops make $55,000 a year. So we could put $5.4 billion as the low level estimate of the cost. Cops obviously have health care benefits and pension and disability benefits for police offers tend to be fairly costly so the real price would be higher than that. At any rate, on both the policing side and the gun control side it would be a mistake to focus too much on spectacular school massacres. What happened at Sandy Hook was terrible, but at least 78 people have been shot and killed in America since then. If you want to regulate guns more strictly, the smart play is to focus on the portable concealable handguns that are widely used in those “ordinary” crimes and if you want to spend billions on hiring new police officers the smart play to focus on deploying them in the high-crime neighborhoods where most of the murdering happens. Obviously one would hope that a less-armed, lower-crime society would also feature fewer monstrous massacres as a side benefit but concentrating our policing resources on static defense of K-12 schools would be foolish.

A gun in every cold, dead hand

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Michael Tomasky calls bullshit on the idea that after the Aurora theater shooting, we’ll work to make sure it “never happens again.” In our current reality, Wayne LaPierre’s National Rifle Association owns the GOP, body and soul, and controls the Democrats through fear. The NRA has successfully marketed itself as the national symbol of ‘Merican Freedom™ and as the only logical answer to all modern fear and anxiety. He says,

“… I can understand why it makes people feel better in some way to say it. But really. Nonsense. We have no collective will in this country to make sure such a day never happens again. In fact, if anything, we are headed for a day when 20 percent of the people in a movie theater are armed themselves, and we have a good old shoot ’em up that would’ve made John Ford’s head spin but will make the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre’s heart soar like an eagle.

“[...] The net effect is that we have laws no one wants—not cops, not the military, not even most gun owners themselves—except the NRA. Earlier this year, the Indiana state house passed—with NRA backing—a bill spelling out when citizens could kill police officers. Some prominent military leaders wanted military personnel to be able to discuss gun safety with troops as a way of trying to stem military suicides, many of which are committed with personally owned guns. The NRA was having none of it. Finally, as to gun owners, I will never forget the late 2009 poll—conducted by Frank Luntz, no less—that found that 69 percent of NRA members back closing the gun show loophole. That poll produced a series of fascinating findings that showed NRA members to be pretty reasonable people in private on the telephone. But alas, in the political arena, in Wayne they trust, I guess.”

Personally I’m not anti-gun. I am against the gunshow loophole. I’m against how easy it is to buy semi-automatic rifles and high capacity mags because Bush let those bans expire. I’m against how easy it is for straw purchasers along the border to load up on semi-autos and high capacity mags for Mexican cartels (Hello! Fast and Furious).

You know who’s not against any of those things? The NRA. Their bottom line is profit for gun manufacturers and dealers — that’s who they lobby for. Doesn’t matter who buys their products, only that their products are bought. If terrible crimes are committed with their product, great. They’re happy to generate more fear so more of their products are purchased. Follow the money.

If you’ve never watched Bowling for Columbine, maybe you should.