Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA, holds a press conference where his best idea for dealing with school shootings is to arm teachers. Larry Ward, chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, said if slaves had been given the right to bear arms, then maybe slavery wouldn’t have happened.
You’d think these were headlines straight out of the satirical newspaper The Onion, but no, they were being dead serious.
There was an old “All in the Family” episode where Archie Bunker appeared on the local news to give his two cents on how to stop airplane hijackings. “All you gotta do,” suggested Archie, “is arm all the passengers.” By Archie’s logic, if everyone on the plane had a gun, skyjackings would disappear overnight. I suspect Wayne LaPierre and Larry Ward wouldn’t get the joke.
Everyone knows the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail – but the NRA’s insistence that the only rational move to deal with the 300 million guns already in this country is to add more guns is insanity of the highest order.
To sell this stupid idea, the NRA recently ran an ad outrageously suggesting that President Obama was a hypocrite for not wanting armed guards at schools when his own children are defended by armed guards 24/7.
This is a prime example of what’s called a “false equivalence,” basically a fancy term for comparing apples to oranges, a favorite rhetorical tool of the right. You know, Obama’s also entitled to fly in Air Force One and take vacations on the taxpayers’ dime; is he a hypocrite because he can do this and you can’t?
It should be obvious to anyone who’s not mentally handicapped that Obama’s kids are exposed to a different level of danger than average American school kids; therefore they’re entitled to a different level of security.
To give you an idea, after Obama was elected in 2008, death threats against the president went up 400 percent. He still gets around 30 death threats per day, making him the most threatened president in U.S. history.
Now, unless you can claim the same terrifying threat level for yourself, then no, your kids aren’t entitled to the same level of security as President Obama. And if you still think you are, then you’re a certified paranoid.
Which brings me to a very important point: There’s a dangerously paranoid streak that runs through the NRA and the type of gun owners who’ve been vocal in the media in the wake of Sandy Hook.
If you ask average gun owners why they want to possess a firearm, you generally get two answers.
The first is that it’s their constitutional right under the Second Amendment. If you’ve bothered to read this one-sentence amendment, it clearly frames the right to bear arms within the context of allowing for a “well regulated militia.” The modern NRA wants to ignore the “militia” clause, but sorry: It’s right there at the beginning of the amendment, and it’s not there for decoration but for clarity.
The second reason people give for wanting to own a firearm is self defense. But just for a moment, think what this says about gun owners: It means they fully expect that at some point in their lives, they’ll be the victim of a crime that will require a literal Dirty Harry-style confrontation where they’ll have the judgment, reflexes and presence of mind to be able to injure or kill another human being, while hoping they don’t injure or kill themselves or other innocent people in the process.
As a comparison, when New York police officers are engaged in a gunfight with perpetrators who aren’t firing back, the hit rate is on average 30 percent – and when the bad guys are firing back, the hit rate drops to 18 percent. That’s for well-trained New York City cops. Do you really think if a crack head breaks into your home at 3 a.m. and you’re half-awake and you’ve got to find your loaded gun in the dark, your results will be better?
Another, darker reason for gun ownership was expressed quite clearly by conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones in a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan: that the guns are there to fight back against the U.S. government if it ever becomes a tyranny. “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms,” an unhinged Jones screamed to a gobsmacked Morgan.
That kind of over-the-top paranoia used to be resigned to crank newsletters found in old bookstores and the darker corners of the Internet, but now it’s right out in the open and reinforced by libertarians and tea party groups – the same “patriots” who revere the Founding Fathers but deeply distrust the government they created.
Look. If one of the reasons you need assault rifles and mountains of ammo is because you truly believe that within your lifetime you may be fighting in the streets, swept up in a violent rebellion against the U.S. government, that level of cartoonish paranoia alone should disqualify you from ever possessing a firearm.
When you think about it, even the NRA’s signature slogan – “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands” – is a ghoulish, unsettling motto, one that suggests firearms are so important to someone that you’ll have to kill them to get them to give it up. Does that sound like something a rational person would say?
Is there any other inanimate object you could imagine saying that about without sounding like an unhinged lunatic?
President Obama held a press conference last week where he made some perfectly reasonable suggestions about how to diminish the scourge of gun violence in America, including universal background checks; banning assault rifles and high capacity clips; and creating stiffer penalties for gun trafficking and lying on paperwork to acquire a firearm. Perhaps none of those would have stopped Sandy Hook, but so what? They’re smart ideas and long overdue.
If common-sense steps like these are inspiring this level of rage among gun owners and threats to impeach the president for acting like a monarch, then I’d submit that those people are way too paranoid to trust with firearms in the first place.
Here’s the deal. The status quo is over, new regulations are on the way, and screaming “they’re coming to take our guns” just makes you sound like a creepy nutcase. We had an assault weapons ban in 1994 and it didn’t lead to a second civil war, so take a deep breath and relax.
Sandy Hook was a shattering tragedy for the American psyche, second only to 9/11 in recent history. But after 9/11 we felt justified spending trillions, starting two wars, killing thousands of innocent civilians overseas, strip-searching passengers at airports, torturing people in secret prisons and illegally wiretapping Americans to gain a sense of security.
In the month after Sandy Hook, more than 1,000 other Americans have been killed by guns. If you truly believe the best we can do to stem the tide of gun violence is to put even more guns into the hands of untrained civilians, then in my humble opinion you shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a deadly weapon.
Charlie Vignola describes himself as a former College Republican turned liberal Democrat. A resident of the Santa Clarita Valley since 1999, he works in the motion picture industry and loves his wife and kids.
They’re Too Paranoid to Trust with Guns | Commentary by Charlie Vignola
