Does the NRA have a stupid pill problem?

We have to start the dialog on limiting 1st Amendment rights. The media has for too long been allowed to fill the minds of potential mass killers with unrestrained images of violence and mayhem. They are also allowed to make instant celebrities of of these killers for naked profit.

We guard our banks...why not our most precious resource?

Extremely weak points , but sounding strong because of the insults.
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Boneheads.

We guard our banks

The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole

Wayne LaPierre, the spokesman for the National Rifle Association, would have been better advised to remain wherever he had been hiding after the Newtown massacre, rather than appear at the news conference on Friday. No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.


Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and video game players.

The N.R.A., which devotes itself to destroying any hope of compromise on guns, however, is blameless. So are the unscrupulous and unlicensed dealers who sell guns to criminals, and the gun makers who bankroll Mr. LaPierre so he can help them keep peddling their ever-more-lethal, ever-more-efficient products, and politicians who kill laws that would exert even modest controls over guns.

He offered nothing more than the most ridiculous anti-gun-control rhetoric we’ve heard since the Newtown murders. His solution to the proliferation of guns, including semiautomatic rifles that have little purpose beyond killing people as quickly as possible, is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards, because his group won’t do anything about the ease with which anyone can get a gun.

He wants volunteer and professional firefighters, who already risk their lives every day, to be charged with thwarting an assault by a deranged murderer. The same applies to paramedics, security guards, veterans, retired police officers. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Mr. LaPierre said. (It is interesting that such a literal reader of the Second Amendment would have missed the fact that Congress has no power over local police forces and schools. Talk about Big Brother government.)

We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob. And let’s be clear, civilians bristling with guns to prevent the “next Newtown” are an armed mob even with training offered up by Mr. LaPierre. Any town officials or school principal who takes up the N.R.A. on that offer should be fired.

Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard — just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians had started firing weapons in the Aurora movie theater.

In the 62 mass-murder cases over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. There are two cases in which armed civilians confronted a shooter. Both were immediately shot. One died.

We have known for many, many years that a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High School in 1999 and traded shots with Eric Harris while 11 of the 13 people he and Dylan Klebold killed were still alive. He missed four times.

People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. Police officers know that firing a weapon is a huge risk; that’s why they avoid doing it. In August, New York City police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building. They killed him and wounded nine bystanders.

Mr. LaPierre said the news media give mass killers the attention they seek. He said the news media call the semiautomatic weapon used in Newtown a machine gun, claim that it’s a military weapon and that it fires the most powerful ammunition available. That’s not true. What is true is that there is a growing call in America for stricter gun control.