Kaiser Bottom Fish OnlineFree trialNew StuffHow It WorksContact UsTerms of UseHome
Specializing in Canadian Stocks
SearchAdvanced Search
Welcome Guest User   (more...)
Home / Works Archive / Kaiser Blog
Kaiser Blog
 

On the stupidity, hypocrisy and cynicism of the NRA


The National Rifle Association, an institution whose celebration of gun culture ranks high along with creationism, enrichment of an economic aristocracy, and gay-bashing as ethical priorities of Republican extremists, on Friday December 21 demonstrated its utter worthlessness by proposing that every American school employ an armed security guard as the best way to protect children, teachers and staff from rampaging lunatics such as Adam Lanza who on December 14 slaughtered 26 people including 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School using a high capacity assault rifle. The stupidity, cynicism and hypocrisy of this proposal is boundless, outmatched only by Mike Huckabee's contention that prayer in school would prevent such massacres.

In the stupidity department one has to wonder why it is only the NRA which cannot understand how useless a security guard packing a handgun would be against a suicidal domestic terrorist with overwhelming firepower randomly every few years targeting one of the more than 100,000 schools in America for reasons nobody can ever really figure out because such killers generally kill themselves or get killed during the police response. And when mass murderers do survive such as in the cases of Anders Breivik who killed 77 people in Norway during 2011, or Jared Loughner who in 2011 opened fire in the middle of a Tucson crowd killing six people including a girl, they tend to be loners with delusional, paranoid ideologies barely distinguishable from what is deemed normal in the world of apocalyptic gold bugs.

In the hypocrisy department the NRA is asking the taxpayers to foot the bill for a full-time armed security guard in each school, of which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics there are 98,917 public schools and 33,366 private schools. In addition there are 6,742 post-secondary institutions which generally already have armed security guards, though given the large size of post-secondary campuses, the response to somebody like the Virginia Tech rampage killer will merely limit not prevent the carnage. Arming every public school with a security guard at a cost of $50,000 annually per guard would saddle public education with $5 billion in extra costs, and the parents who send their kids to private school with an extra $1.7 billion, with no guarantee that the guard will be in the right place at the right time to stop a suicidal rampage killer before the slaughter has begun. The NRA is supposed to be a Republican lobby group; its proposal would be much more consistent with the anti-tax Republican philosophy if it volunteered to ding its membership $7 billion annually in fees that would be forwarded to America's public and private schools.

The NRA is correct in fingering the culture of online video violence as encouraging a mindset of detachment from reality among young people who have never experienced the horror of actual violence. The vast majority of young people, however, remain grounded in reality, and simply drive parents crazy because they are wasting their time training for a career as drone operators (not likely) or cannon fodder (please not) in America's Army. It is difficult to tell when an individual's fantasy world starts to seep into his or her everyday world, because, thanks to the gun culture promoted by the NRA, it is perfectly normal and legal to seek out weapons and accessories that have nothing to do with the sportsmanlike hunting of wildlife. It is the easy accessibility of assault weapons which makes a future devoid of random mass killings by drug-addled, mentally unbalanced or reality-divorced loners impossible to prevent.

The cynicism of the NRA in fingering the violent video culture as the culprit is disgusting because in fact this video culture promotes the sale of semi-automatic weapons to "hobbyists" who retreat to their rural hideouts to shoot up targets as they fantasize about their self-trained capacity to serve in some future guerilla war against a wide range of imagined enemies, or vent their hatreds by adorning their targets with posters of their favorite Obama or Osama villain. Beyond ranting and raving in bars and on talk radio this largely rural based crowd of gun advocates causes little trouble, but it is the gun industry's catering to their fantasies which makes it possible for random, isolated killing sprees such as Columbine and Sandy Hook to surprise us periodically with their deadly efficiency.

The idea that killing sprees in benign settings such as a school, shopping mall or movie theatre might never happen if every adult packed a concealed handgun is a fantasy in itself because proper use of a handgun in a situation of extreme stress and confusion such as a weapons based terror attack or a rampaging killer requires extensive training, not just in handling the weapon, but in evaluating the situation. Imagine the crowded Aurora theatre setting where the suspect James Holmes starts shooting people at random, and every Tom, Dick and Harry suddenly pulls out his handgun and with adrenalin soaring through the roof amid the noise and panic starts looking for the enemy only to find himself surrounded by wild-eyed Toms, Dicks and Harries waving guns in futile search of the real enemy who may very well be wielding a much deadlier semi-automatic assault weapon. Do we really need the kill score leveraged by the friendly fire of amateurs?

The NRA should stop the bullshit and admit what it really thinks: the periodic massacre of children and other innocents by outliers is an acceptable price for the freedom to own guns of any nature.

 
 

You can return to the Top of this page


Copyright © 2024 Kaiser Research Online, All Rights Reserved