Up is down. War is peace.
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre just went on national television to tell the country that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” In other words, the only solution to gun violence is gun fights.
LaPierre also said, “I call on Congress, today, to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”
What LaPierre and all of the other gun fetishists out there are saying to America is that their freakish desire to own and shoot assault weapons that can fire countless rounds without reloading must be preserved at any cost and their solution to the gun violence that results from the presence of these weapons in our communities is to turn our schools into armed camps with armed guards. Every. Single. School.
As so many gun fetishists do, he blamed it on mental illness. Putting aside for a moment that the very people protecting the gun fetishists “rights” have been the ones to eliminate funding for mental health services around the country, why are we not talking about the real mental illness here? Why is it not considered a mental illness to get obscene pleasure from owning and shooting weapon that has only one purpose: to injure or kill human beings.
THAT, I would argue, is a clear sign of mental illness.
One wonders what the impact of having our kids seeing armed people in their schools every single day will have. Does it not send them the message that the world is a dangerous place and that they should be afraid wherever they go? Will that not create even more unstable adults in the long term? Of course it will.
The NRA is losing this battle of ideas in American. The vast majority of us see nothing of value from assault weapons. We don’t need to have our “man card reissued” by owning a gun. We don’t get pleasure from shooting guns. We don’t strive to be Rambo or Dirty Harry. We see guns as something to be diminished in our society, not worshipped or held as more important than our right to safety and freedom from fear.
If you want to argue that the core problem here is mental illness, go right ahead. But never forget this one important fact:
Gun fetishism IS a mental illness.
Adding… The National Center for Education Statistics says that, in the 2009-2010 school year, there were 132,183 public and private K-12 schools in this country. Leave it to the NRA to come up with a solution to gun violence that involves putting over 132,000 new guns into our communities. The mind, it boggles.
