At a hotel in downtown Washington, not far from the White House, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held it's long anticipated press conference, where it had promised to make a "meaningful contribution" to the debate about how to end much gun violence - particularly mass shootings.
The NRA had remained silent for days in the wake of the Newtown shootings a week earlier, where 20-year-old Adam Lanza, in effect, stole his mother's guns, using it against her as she slept, and then going to the local elementary school, Sandy Hook Elementary, where his mother worked, and blasting his way in after they did not let him in. He then proceeded to kill 20 children and 6 adults, before turning the gun on himself.
The nation was utterly shocked. It had seen this kind of a thing before - plenty of times, actually. But perhaps it was the nature of this attack in particular- where little children were targeted and mercilessly murdered - that breathed new life into gun control advocates. While gun control and taking on the powerful NRA lobby has never been easy, and in fact, has been something that politicians are so reluctant to do that they often skirt the issue altogether, the shock value of the tragedy in Connecticut last week seemed to kick start a renewed effort to put in place new gun laws and restrictions with a fierce sense of urgency.
The gun debate was back on, and this time, it seemed, there was a change: for a few days, it was gun advocates who were unusually quiet and reserved, and gun control advocates seemed to be gearing up for major action. The NRA remained uncharacteristically silent.
But that changed by mid-week, when the NRA announced that it would hold a major press conference on Friday (yesterday) and would have contribute to the gun debate and how to curb the violence in a real way.
Some were expecting that the NRA, not known for making any concessions, to finally show a willingness to compromise.
That did not happen.
NRA Vice-President Wayne LaPierre claimed that the best answer, at least in the immediate future, to ending school violence is to place armed guards in every school. He said that armed guards kept places like banks, airports, and other public buildings safer, and that it would help make schools safer, as well. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he said.
"Think about it," he said, "We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses, even sports stadiums are all protected by armed security."
He went on to say how the President and members of Congress inside of the Capitol building have armed guards protecting them.
"Yet when it comes to our most beloved, innocent, and vulnerable members of the American family, our children, we as a society leave them everyday utterly defenseless. And the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it. That must change now."
"Why is the idea of a gun good when it's used to protect our president or our country or our police, but bad when it's used to protect our children in their schools?"
He also asked those listening: "Does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment?"
LaPierre also pointed fingers of blame. He said:
“A child growing up in America today witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18,” he said. “And throughout it all, too many in the national media, their corporate owners, and their stockholders act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonized gun owners.”
The press conference was interrupted twice by protesting gun control advocates.
Responses were varied nationwide. But there was a strong wave of resistance to this new "contribution" to the debate by the NRA. Dennis Van Roekel, the President of the National Education Association, responded: "If your purpose is to reduce gun violence in schools, then the solution isn't to add more guns to schools."
Bill Bond, a consultant National Association of Secondary School Principals, said that while the NRA's proposals of having an armed guard would likely improve school security, it is not sure that it would have prevented what happened at Sandy Hook last week - or perhaps if it will prevent the next such attack. "He might have stopped it. He might have shortened it. He might have been the first one killed," Bond said.
The head of the nation's largest teacher's union claimed that the NRA was "out of touch".
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has long been a gun control advocate, also chimed in, blasting the NRA's proposal.
"They offer a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe, " he said of the NRA and their proposals from yesterday's press conference.
Personal Opinion
It seems to me that guns and gun control appears so divisive, that it is the new slavery that seems to be dividing this nation, tearing it apart. The two sides seem to be so far apart, so that they cannot understand one another.
LaPierre also made a prediction about the media, claiming that they will unfairly taint the stories to favor their own, anti-gun positions. He said:
"More guns, you'll claim, are the NRA's answer to everything. Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools."
The thing is, the NRA's answer always seems to be more guns. When has it ever advocated a different position? Let us not forget that the NRA profits from the popularity of guns, and there consistency with pro-gun positions, and wanting more, not less, guns within our society, speaks for itself. It was like that in the aftermath of Columbine, when the NRA put forth a similar proposal, wanting armed guards in all of our schools. More guns were the answer back then, as well. Was it really different this time around, when they essentially proposed the same thing? Having armed guards inside of every school is, indeed, bringing more guns into our schools, is it not? It also surely would raise government expenditures and involvement, and this is a proposal by people who usually are so vehement about smaller government with less involvement in people's everyday lives.
Plus, armed guards won't always prevent or stop shootings, although the NRA does not seem to mention or recognize that very real possibility.
LaPierre also asked what makes guns protecting children in school so bad, when we find it so acceptable to have people with guns protecting the president, or banks, or others. I think perhaps one answer would be that it would be tantamount to accepting that such things as mass shootings are the reality in this world, or perhaps particularly in this country. Other countries may have apparently solved their problem by banning, or severely restricting, the availability of the very deadliest assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons, but the NRA's position is, always has been, and always will be that this is the United States, and thus, we cannot impose any limitations on the whims of any given citizen to purchase the weapon of their choice, no matter how deadly, and no matter what the intended use. If someone is "bad", purchases some assault weapons, and desires to go to a local school and start shooting, then there will be a "good guy" with a gun to strike him down. That is the better solution than to imposing any restrictions on allowing that sick individual to get those weapons in the first place. So, the easy solution, the one that they presented as their "meaningful contribution", is actually the same old argument that they have used in the past. They simply recycled it, or perhaps a more apt way of putting it with the NRA is to say they reloaded it, to take aim now at their detractors. More armed men is the answer to combat other, "bad" armed men. Armed guards will apparently solve the problem, and any limitations on acces to weapons is simply not an option that is on the table with the NRA.
Let me reiterate, however, that this is not a new line of argument for the NRA. Not even close. In April of 1999, in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, Charlton Heston said, "If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly."
Remember, Columbine had an armed guard, an armed sheriff's deputy, but no one, most especially the NRA, will brag about the success of having an armed guard that time. In fact, it seems that they tend not to mention that fact at all, and Charlton Heston seemed to have conveniently rewritten history to suit the NRA's purposes. Columbine did indeed have an armed guard on that awful day, but having an armed guard seemed not to have helped at all that time.
But is it really that surprising? After all, there were two kids with advanced weaponry in that school shooting. Adam Lanza had very sophisticated weaponry in last week's shootings, as well. A guard might not risk his life, sacrifice himself, in order to stop such a shooting. If he is outgunned, the truth of the matter is that we cannot rely on him to actually stop, or even to slow, the slaughter.
Also, there is the not small matter of our schools increasingly beginning to resemble prisons, with locked doors and armed guards and orderly lines everywhere. I can't be the only one who thinks that this might not be the best solution, that it is, in fact, a bad thing.
Let us also not forget that mass shootings are not by any means restricted to schools. There was another mass shooting in Pennsylvania just yesterday morning. And we all remember that recently, we had public shootings in situations that were entirely different from Newtown, and away from any schools. There was the shooting that targeted Congresswoman Giffords, as well as the movie theater at Aurora, Colorado, and at the Siek temple in Michigan. The victims there were not always entirely adults, either. Should we rely and place our entire trust on private citizens carrying guns to stop those kinds of incidents?
Already, there are 140,000 schools throughout the United States, and it would undeniably be an enormous expense to put armed guards in every single one of them. But what about other places that have mass shootings? Are armed guards the answers there? Or should we trust citizens, or as the NRA would put it, "good guys" with guns to take care of the "bad guys" when these things happen?
The NRA thinks of guns simply as tools, and that these tools are what helped build this country. Anyone can use them, and it is up to the user, whether these tools are used in the right way, or in the wrong way. But guns are a proud, American tradition.
But tools are usually used for something constructive. What possibly can be a constructive use of a semi-automatic weapon, which remain legal? When actually used, it is designed to do one thing: kill. Kill efficiently, at that. Quickly and efficiently, and that is why such weapons have been used in such shootings time and time again.
The days of the wild, wild west are over. We are supposed to be a civilized nation. Yet, of all the industrialized nations, we are the only one that seems to have so many mass shootings. Let me repeat, because that is a point that bears repeating: we are the only industrialized nation in which mass shootings is a routine problem. Other nations can't evne begin to understand the American mentality on this particular issue. The British press apparently had to give a warning that the NRA's much anticipated press conference was "not a parody". There was nothing new in it, and it seemed that the NRA had absolutely nothing to say about Sandy Hook, or any real potential solutions to solving, or at least limiting, America's problem with such random mass shootings. It seems that there are large stretches of time when we hardly go more than a few weeks, a few months at most, without some kind of mass shooting. Since the Aurora shootings this past summer, we have had to hear about shootings like a number of times already. Where else do you hear about such things with an alarming degree of regularity and repetition? For that matter, where else would an organization like the NRA get away with the repetition of their own arguments, and their own narrow self-interest?
The NRA has a membership of around 4 million, and yet they seem to wield enormous power over a nation of well over 300 million. To say that they have hit harder than their weight is an understatement, and a major one at that.. They also continually claim that banning any such weapons would be pointless because, they claim, people who really want such weapons will get them, whether they are legal or not. But is this not a nation of laws? What good are those laws, or any laws, really, if we keep making the self-serving excuse that people who ignore the laws of the land will ultimately win out in the end, time and time again? So, we should just trust in the good intentions of those who buy such deadly weapons, trust that they will not use them for harm and, failing that, that some armed good guy will step in and save the day whenever one of these nuts suddenly mistakes gun violence as portrayed in countless movies or video games for real life, and plays his own, deadly version of "shoot 'em up"?
Perhaps, as the NRA suggests, we should suspend our suspicions and simply trust "good" gun owners. But the gun owner in last weeks shootings in Newtown was also fit the definition of a "good" gun owner. Evidently, she boasted about her guns from time to time, and took great pride in possessing them. She herself was killed, having never done anything really truly wrong with those guns. Yet, they not only were used against her, but then used against the twenty children and six adults killed in the carnage, before Adam Lanza used them on himself. There may be some who would argue that she used poor judgment in having such guns on her home with such a disturbed individual like Adam Lanza living with her. Or, perhaps, the fault was hers for not keeping them locked up more securely?
Why is it that it's always individuals being blamed for these actions, and that there always seems to be enough fingerpointing to go around? It was Adam Lanza's fault, to be sure. But was his mother not at least a bit to blame? What about psychologists? Shouldn't they have been able to see this coming, to see some signs? What about unarmed teachers and principals? Should they get the brunt of the blame?
Is that what we have come to in America? We simply find convenient scapegoats to blame?
"NRA offensive exposes deep U.S. divisions on guns" by David Ingram and Patricia Zengerle of Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/nra-offensive-exposes-deep-u-divisions-guns-001840917--finance.html;_ylt=A2KLOzL6mNVQgnUAVYjQtDMD
"NRA wants armed guns in schools" by Patricia Zengerle, Dan Burns, and Edith Honan
http://news.yahoo.com/more-funerals-newtown-white-house-gun-task-force-003934633.html
"NRA Press Conference: Put Armed Guards in Schools (+ video)", by Linda Fieldmann of the Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/1221/NRA-press-conference-Put-armed-guards-in-schools-video
Here's an interesting op/ed piece by Kristin A. Goss of CNN, "NRA's Vision of "genuine monsters"
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/opinion/goss-nra-guns/index.html
This was also an interesting piece which illustrates just how difficult it is to predict who is at risk of massive violence at any given time or place:
http://news.yahoo.com/predicting-whos-risk-violence-isnt-easy-083151325.html
I thought this was a worthwhile article on the NRA, as well, and so will add it here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2012/12/22/the-nras-communications-crisis-crisis/
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