As WC listened to NRA flak and alleged human being Wayne LaPierre mouth the NRA’s idiot ideas yesterday, WC wondered how much the guy had to be paid to sell his soul.
In the case of LaPierre, he got a pretty good price for hawking his pitiful, tattered humanity. About $971,000 in 2010, according to the on-line Form 990 filed by his employer.
And for that princely sum, LaPierre appeared, while the grief-stricken parents in Newtown were still burying their children, and while yet another mass shooting was under way in Pennsylvania, to offer the NRA’s solution to vast numbers of firearms in our society and the resulting horrors like Sandy Hook Elementary.
More guns.
That’s right, an armed guard at every school. Of course, in the case of some of the bigger schools, it might take several armed guards. But the NRA’s solution is more guns.
Wait. Weren’t there security guards at Columbine High School? Is WC mis-recalling?
Never mind. More guns. If you went to the NRA headquarters complaining of a toothache, it would prescribe “more guns.”
We’re now going to treat burns with more fire. And frozen pipes with dry ice. And breath-taking ignorance and stupidity with less education. These guys would treat bubonic plague by releasing more rats.
WC is sometimes too cynical, but that may not be possible here. The major firearms manufacturers are huge contributors to the NRA. And the NRA’s latest idiot idea will certainly sell a lot of additional firearms. It’s no different than the tobacco companies huge contributions to their stooge “independent research laboratories,” who would solemnly announce there was no link between smoking and cancer. We’re seeing the same technique here. It’s just a different disease.
The NRA continues its thuggish insistence that the Second Amendment, unlike the other parts of the Bill of Rights, cannot be qualified or limited in any way. Wayne LaPierre made that official.
But despite nailing down almost $1 million a year, he didn’t take any questions from the media. Apparently, he’s not paid enough to answer questions.
Wickersham's Conscience 
The objective is to control the discourse. To control the discourse is to control the manner in which the perception of reality is communicated. Advocacy of more guns, and the acceptance of “more guns” as the answer, thereby establishes the norm as “more guns.” In the long term, the objective is to have successive generations with an unquestioning acceptance of guns and more guns as the norm and the answer to whatever is the problem. The special kicker is “stand your ground,” a special gift for those who have real difficulty with interpersonal conflict resolution skills.
Notice one of the current usages in controlling discourse, and that is to deny that one knows what is an “assault weapon.” After all, what does that require and how many rounds must it be able to fire and how rapidly must it be capable of firing, and on and on? So there’s no concession that the Bushmaster is an assault weapon since the gun fanatic insists that its capabilities cannot validly be distinguished from, say, a hunting rifle, or a pistol, and maybe even the butter knife in the wrong hands. That goes hand in hand with the usage of false equivalencies. Anything can be used as a weapon so should we be moving to control and to regulate this or that (name the object that is the “weapon”), including the butter knife.
As to the current suggestion of armed cops in the schools, none of the estimates of costs for such a program at any level, statewide or nationwide, include the costs for lifelong PTSD treatment of those victimized by violence that will unfold even with cops in schools. No money is projected as costs for long term mental health treatment of the school kids who will be witnesses to shootouts, for the cops who will do the shooting and esp. the cops who will shoot (or think that he/she has shot) school child/ren in the line of fire. It’s the “good guy” who will suffer from PTSD even if the “bad guy” gets dispatched if in the course of it all either one of them has killed student/s. If there is any doubt that such mental health care will NOT be provided and will not be planned for, just look at our Veterans Administration relationship with combat casualties whom we sent to war zones. The VA is overwhelmed, and mental health care is one of the most difficult because of the special way in which its damage is intractable. The NRA/GOA proposals are straight out of La-la Land.
Paul Eaglin
Fairbanks
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allow me to channel my inner LaPierre…
pish-tosh. we should skip more cops in schools and jump to the logical answer. we can’t rely on cops to be in the right place every time. nor can we rely on the teacher in a classroom to defend every child with equal veracity. besides, kids are inside the school’s protective field of fire just five days each week and anytime they stray from the family compound. weekends and summer vacation are unspoken invitations to slaughter! everyone is ultimately responsible for their own self defense. it should be clear to dimmest of liberals and sappiest of tree huggers; all children should be armed! beside the murder rate dropping to zero just think of the jobs created! monstrous jumps in gun manufacturing, ammunition sales, Hello Kitty body armor licensing and urban warfare training. the nation will be out of debt, everyone will be employed and the Canadians will think twice before invading North Dakota.
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That is precisely the objective, Mr. Garrett. You’ve nailed it.
His performance Friday and yesterday–as well as the NRA President’s in yesterday’s interview–make clear that there is no concept too looney if it means more guns. Their fanatics are deluded with this magical thinking that the bullets of the righteous will unerringly find their targeted “bad guys.” LaPierre avoided military service, and too many of the gunslinger types in modern influential positions are unfamiliar with actual military service. So he has no idea what a firefight or skirmish is like except in his deluded dreams. Take your common everyday firefight–and that day may be just around the corner for us–and toss a bunch of frightened, screaming 6 year olds and other innocents in the midst of the line of fire. It will be the “good guys” who will hesitate firing, and it will be First Responders who will be at risk of getting shot and killed because of the return fire coming from good and bad. The military and police forces put their forces through simulations that present just those sorts of challenges to train fighters to make decisions in an environment like that. Like Dick Cheney, Wayne LaPierre’s boldness and courage go only so far as sending other people to their deaths while raking in tons of money in salary and benefits for himself.
Paul Eaglin
Fairbanks
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