NRA Gets It From Both Sides

Posted by Jeff Carter
on December 21st, 2012

My Twitter stream exploded when Wayne Lapierre opened his mouth. Both the left wingers and right wingers I follow made fun of him. Being a lifetime NRA member, I thought I might check out the transcript to see exactly what the heck he said.

I wish the NRA would have come out with a response to the shootings right away saying how sorry they were for the families of the victims, and that we should respect their privacy, honor their loss, and pray for them. Simple as that. Leave the politics for later.

The NRA kept quiet but no one else did. Especially the anti-gun lobby. So, they were forced to speak out. Unfortunately, what they said isn’t going to give them much credibility in the debate.

I understand that schools are gun free zones and politicians crow about establishment of them. But I don’t think that touting that incites killers to range into schools and start firing away. The killers that have were all mentally deranged. Making any crime on or near school grounds a Class X felony is a good idea, and already on the books in most states.

Go directly to jail for a mandatory prison term if you engage in illicit activity on or near school grounds. Boom.

Of course, to deranged people, statutes of any kind don’t matter. The NRA paid lip service to that, then blamed video games, movies, and pornography. Hardly a well thought out solution to a problem.

Then, Lapierre offers up the solution. Armed guards in every school. Huh? Really? Anyone do a cost/benefit analysis of that at the NRA? He offers up a fantasy where an armed guard would have stopped the killer. Maybe. But maybe not. Armed guards can’t be everywhere all the time. This killer blew through some glass in a different part of the school. I don’t know about you, but when I was a cadet at the US Air Force Academy, I lead a couple of “spirit missions” at night that went undetected until the morning. There isn’t a school in the US his solution would work unless we want to go back to one room schoolhouses.

There is a better way. But, as I said before, we aren’t going to miraculously stumble across it soon. We have to think hard about all these things. From all angles. It takes time to figure out all the consequences and costs. All the NRA did was prove it was tone deaf to what happened.

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