Did the NRA just shoot itself in the foot? Here’s hoping.
The NRA response to the school shooting in Connecticut is awful, but not surprising. After all, this is just another group that has no incentive to moderate its positions or offer any conciliatory gestures, even in the wake of such a horrible tragedy.
In fact, it can’t. If it does, its influence wanes, and its relevance and survival are both threatened.
As I’ve indicated already, corporations and special-interest groups don’t exist to help shape reasonable policy that serves public safety or welfare. They exist solely to achieve a very specific, self-serving, profitable goal — however extreme or outrageous it may be.
So while we may be repulsed by the NRA’s brash, defiant, heartless tone, we shouldn’t be surprised. If, in the interest of self-preservation, this organization’s leaders have to double down on the senseless gun policies that facilitate atrocities like what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, you’d better believe they will.
And if they have to insist on so-called solutions that border on the delusional and sound more like headlines from The Onion than serious ideas, you’d better believe they’ll do that, too. (Progressive media outlets like the Daily Kos blog have been quick to point out that sites of previous shootings, such as Columbine High School in Colorado, did have armed guards, to little avail.)
If we must resurrect the archaic argument that more guns will make us safer — that, in fact, this sort of thing wouldn’t happen if we simply became a militaristic society — then let’s be careful not to omit any critical details.
Among them: It’s widely known that the mother of the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a gun enthusiast, and she kept a small arsenal in the house she shared with her mentally ill son. It’s not clear why she did. (I can’t reconcile the idea of keeping any dangerous items in a dwelling with an unbalanced individual, firearms or not. But that’s another discussion.)
Was she afraid of intruders in her affluent, suburban Connecticut neighborhood where opulent houses sit on multiple acres? (If so, she must have been anticipating invasion by a small militia, given her stash of high-powered weapons.)
Did she simply collect firearms the same way some people do stamps?
Or, a more sinister possibility: Was she afraid of her own son?
We don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that her son was able to get his hands on these guns, murder her while she slept, and drive to an elementary school where he did the unmentionable with those same weapons — in particular, a rapid-fire semiautomatic rifle similar to those used by troops in Afghanistan, as the New York Times reports.
Do we really want to continue to peddle the notion that more guns will make us safer? Imagine that an armed guard had been posted at the Connecticut school where the carnage took place. How consequential would his or her sidearm have been in relation to the military-style device carried by the killer?
Damn the NRA. It’s time for comprehensive gun control reform that will reduce the incidence of massacres of innocent people. (Notice that I didn’t say “stop.” We won’t entirely stop this kind of tragedy as long as there are deranged individuals who are set on destroying lives. But that’s no excuse whatsoever for doing nothing, as long as there are at least some lives that can be saved.)
It’s time to permanently reinstate the federal ban on assault weapons. There’s no earthly reason why civilians should carry the same kind of weapons that military personnel use in combat. These are manufactured solely to be instruments of death; they aren’t needed for sport or personal protection.
It’s also time to outlaw the sale or possession of high-capacity magazines, which allow for the murders of large numbers of people without the need to reload the weapon.
And it’s time to establish federal laws that require stringent, universal background checks, long waiting periods, and minimum legal ages for the purchase of firearms. Internet sales of guns should be outlawed. So should sales of guns to people who are known to be mentally ill.
Most of all, we need to revisit the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place. But that’s for another post.
If the events of December 14 taught us anything, it’s that we need to do something — and easier access to more guns isn’t the answer. Neither is pretending that they aren’t part of the problem.
Neither is waiting until the raw emotions of this terrible tragedy subside so we can lull ourselves into another period of complacency while the perpetrator of the next atrocity does his planning.
Here’s another good column by Nicholas Kristof on what we need to do about the Sandy Hook tragedy.
