Amen Brother Peterr.

Now is the time to separate the regular people who belong to the NRA from the insane posse that is today’s NRA. I urge all members of the NRA to reconsider their membership. Perhaps there’s a saner organization that meets your gun owning needs.

Who defines who the “good guys” are and who the “bad guys” are? Are we going to require them to wear white hats and black hats? Or is LaPierre saying he has changed his mind about background checks? And how does he expect us to institute a national database on mental illness? Would he support its use to deny people the right to buy guns?

Here’s what I haven’t heard discussed:

Nancy Lanza knew her son had serious mental problems, to the point where she kept him home from school.

Nancy Lanza had several legal semi-automatic guns in her home.

Nancy Lanza taught her mentally unstable son how to use those guns because she thought he would develop a sense of “responsibility.”

Nancy Lanza was killed by her mentally unstable son with one of her own guns.

I’d like to know LaPierre’s reaction to that.

Who defines who the “good guys” are and who the “bad guys” are? Are we going to require them to wear white hats and black hats? Or is LaPierre saying he has changed his mind about background checks? And how does he expect us to institute a national database on mental illness? Would he support its use to deny people the right to buy guns?

I sincerely doubt that LaPierre has even considered such questions. He’s a pathologically obsessed kook whose only comprehensible motive is to prop up a multi-billion dollar weapons industry.

I had to laugh when I heard LaPierre calling for an “…active national database of the mentally ill” given how hard LaPierre and the NRA have fought against any type of background check. And that does not even begin to touch on how incredibly invasive and stigmatizing such a database would be.

An ounce of prevention is worth ten rounds of cure.

“Incredibly invasive and stigmatizing” is the whole point.

Please keep up.

/LaPierre

More gun control would be good, and more treatment options for mentally ill persons and their families would be great. Sadly, we have so many guns in our homes that we will not stop the crazy from coming with or without guns. I think your point that we don’t know when a “regular” person will snap and use guns is the bottom line.

The homes without guns in our country are outnumbered by the homes with guns. The homes with guns will never have enough to feel safe. This is a problem of addiction and hoarding. Both problems are rampant in our culture, and there are a thousand reasons every day to become angry.

So I don’t see much change coming, with or without gun control and mental health options. Until this old/afraid group dies and the next generation is able to manifest the new tomorrow we would all like to see.

At the Gabby Giffords shooting an armed bystander almost shot a “good guy” who was wrestling the shooter on the ground.

At these times, unlike Hollywood westerns –which are FICTION–it’s almost impossible to know who is who fast enough to avoid a tragic mistake. And while you are standing there trying to figure out who is the bad guy, the bad guy can shoot you too.

The leadership of the NRA are wholly captured by the gun industry and do not work for the benefit or interest of rank and file NRA members. Those members are just human shields used by the gun industry to camouflage the fact that the NRA has been turned into a gun maker’s chamber of commerce.

Rank and file NRA members are far for sane and in touch with reality than their leadership would suggest.

Historically, the scapegoating and marginalization of a significant part of a population that is more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence has always gone well. I don’t know why anyone could object to LaPuke’s mental health database.

And even if you *do* correctly identify and hit the target, if he’s wearing body armor he may kill you anyway and keep going.

How much “new business” will the NRA get out of LaPierre/NRA’s recommendations? Billions of dollars for armed guards, training, databases, and more GUNS! It is a win-win for the gun industry.

Not to mention, of course, that it is far, far preferable not to have a gun battle in the first place.

And who would decide who would be on the database? Want to bet that it would be overwhelmingly black like our prison “system”? Or have far more women in it than men? I can only surmise how it would be skewed.

LaPierre is a ripe example of how well this country has been divided into good and bad guys. It is the Hatfields and the McCoys all over again. Except that LaPierre probably isn’t willing to identify the bad guys since they are a moving target.

Oh I get the scapegoating and marginalization is the whole point. I’m just amazed at how the TradMed is covering the proposal of the database as if it is something LaPierre and the NRA has always espoused when all they have ever done is fight the idea of any checks that stood in the way of anyone getting a weapon.

So he’s proposing a bad database, the use of which hurts people for no real reason, and is a product he can then turn around and fight and use to raise money. It is actually a total win-win is surely what he is thinking

Well, I’m pretty sure that the database would include me. Major depressive disorder. It would include GoodMrsPuma. It would include several of my friends. None of us have any history of violent behavior, and none of us would touch a gun with a ten-foot pole, but that isn’t really LaPuke’s point. He wants scapegoats, not solutions.

He lives in a demon-haunted world, a very lucrative one, and he wants to share his demons.

I don’t think I’d have the heart to watch the media coverage even if I had cable. I’m sure they’re busily evaluating the “merits” of the proposals made by Very Serious People like LaPuke.

Some of the most creative people are “crazy”.

I very rarely watch Lawrence O’Donnell’s show but last night he was awesome delivering his “Last Word” on the program. It was about 15 minutes long, but very, very good.
I see today that it is covered on both Crooks and Liars and HuffingtonPost in it’s entirety.
What a takedown of LaPierre’s argument and he did it with such class in mentioning why the NRA gets so much airtime when AARP and Union leaders could never get the three network coverage that the NRA got yesterday.
When LaPierre, John Bolton and Grover Norquist are officers of this organization and did not serve in the war of their generation (Vietnam) it is offensive to me.
Thank you for the post Peterr, it was a necessary post.

I am finding L O’D pretty interesting lately. I have gotten used to his delivery or he has gotten better.

The following, quoted in full, comes from warisacrime.org. It explains what the Second Amendment is supposed to mean, as opposed to how the RATS have perverted it:

[mod note: Please do not post a full piece published by someone else at another site without their permission. Give us an excerpt, and then post a link back to the original. We don't like it when people take our content and put it up elsewhere without permission, and want to treat others with the same respect.]

The Second Amendment Does NOT Condone Random Slaughter
By davidswanson – Posted on 15 December 2012
By Harvey Wasserman

The Second Amendment does NOT guarantee the right of any and all citizens to own any and all kinds of guns.

It DEMANDS, in the name of national security, that we regulate it.

NEVER let assertions of the so-called “sanctity” of the 2d Amendment bully you into thinking it guarantees unregulated weapon ownership.

It does NOT.

Contrary to the propaganda perpetrated by the gun lobby, the 2d Amendment is the most heavily modified, curbed, explained, complex and contradictory of all the first ten Amendments. [snip]

They can ban the ammo that would supply those guns, though.

I guess I will have to start watching his show more. Thank you for sharing your POV.

Chris Rock suggests that bullets should cost $5,000 apiece.

Meet The Press is not on cable, and Dancin’ Dave is going to sit down with LaPierre to discuss this Very Serious Proposal.

In the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been new calls for tougher restrictions on access to guns in America. Sunday, in his first interview since the shooting, we’ll talk exclusively with the head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, about gun control and what he thinks should be done to curb the threat of violence in America.

Q1: Should the armed guards in our schools have Uzis or Glocks? . . .

followup Q: What about grenades? What if instead of one or two shooters, a whole platoon descends on a school? . . .

I attended a meeting of our “police oversight commission” a week or so ago. It is clear that police are never brought up on charges for killing or murder on the job (or off, whatever) because they are allowed to make “mistakes” when they shoot. As Cynthia points out, civilians can make mistakes with shooting too, but they won’t get the same cover as the police who can kill with impunity.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has argued that Madison’s real intent was not to guarantee all individuals a right to gun ownership, but to assure the states that the federal government would not disband their militias.

The state militias have been disbanded by sending them to the Middle East. They are well regulated in a far away place and many suffer from PTSD.

“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. 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.”

I disagree with LaPierre’s solution to the problem, but I agree with his statement, pasted above. The gaming and entertainment industries are making mountains of money off of gross and ever more fetishistic displays of violence and gore. It is a knee jerk reaction of liberals to suggest that the media is no part of the problem. While there is probably no cause and effect relationship, who could doubt that these games and programs are not encouraging young men to be violent? Who could doubt that they have a desensitizing effect on the psyche? People who make cable programming and movies have taken to making heroes out of serial killers and butcherers of people, mass murderers and the like. A law restricting minors’ access to ultraviolent video games should be passed, and the president should dare the supreme court to void it. The Congress should hold hearings on ultraviolent t.v. and movie programming and ask industry executives where their ethics fit in with their business strategies, if anywhere.

Thank you, Moderator. Will do.

good family fun

A law restricting minors’ access to ultraviolent video games should be passed

Impossible to enforce. And I don’t want the government that is in place now deciding anything about how children are raised.

Those same games and movies are played and watched world wide, yet only in America do we have 12,000 gun deaths a year. Care to explain that?

Doesn’t Japan have some pretty violent movies and videogames? How much gun violence do they have?

Why call it a “press conference” when no questions were allowed?

Because that way, the captive audience press shows up and reports LaPuke’s discombobulated rant.

It’s not nearly — not NEARLY — that simple.

Back in 1985, well before the shoot-em-up video games took hold, and well before violence on television was anything like what we see today, Alex Kotlowitz began work on There Are No Children Here. Two editorial reviews sum up the book like this:

Amazon.com Review
There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago’s West Side, literally learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver,” says Lafeyette at one point. That’s if, not when–spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book’s title comes from a comment made by the brothers’ mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: “There are no children here,” she says. “They’ve seen too much to be children.” This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos.

From Publishers Weekly
The devastating story of brothers Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, children of the Chicago ghetto, is powerfully told here by Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first met the boys in 1985 when they were 10 and seven, respectively. Their family includes a mother, a frequently absent father, an older brother and younger triplets. We witness the horrors of growing up in an ill-maintained housing project tyrannized by drug gangs and where murders and shootings frequently occur. Lafayette tries to cope by stifling his emotions and turning himself into an automaton, while Pharoah first attempts to regress into early childhood and then finds a way out by excelling at school. Kotlowitz’s affecting report does not have a “neat and tidy ending. . . . It is, instead, about a beginning, the dawning of two lives.” These are lives at a crossroads, not totally without hope of triumphing over their origin. ( Apr .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Video games didn’t do this.

It’s a powerful book that brings a serious dose of reality.

Because if the NRA billed it as the “royal audience” it was, other powerful people might take offense.

But they already do.

I don’t accept your premise.

I never said it was that simple.

Why not? Does that premise in some way conflict with any facts? If so, let us in on it.

and VOILA! Wayne shoots and scores, topic of discussion is now video games NOT the NRA.

Wayne LaPierre, and Grover Norquist, who’s on the NRA’s board of directors, should both be forced to perform 1,000 hours of community service, taken to crime scenes involving military-grade assault weapons and clips, given towels and a bucket to clean up all the blood and guts and brains splattered everywhere.

For instance, LaPierre and Norquist (and any other NRA fanatic, like David Keene) should have been escorted to the Sandy Hook school before any clean-up was begun by anyone else, and shown firsthand the horrific consequences of one of their Second Amendment “remedies,” forced to walk through the carnage, treading among the dead, blown-apart bodies of the teachers and students, given body bags and tags, and after scooping up all the dead, given towels and buckets to clean up all the blood off the floors and walls.

Maybe, just maybe, this might actually cause them to really think of a “meaningful contribution” to gun safety in the United States. I doubt it. They’d more likely get down on their hands and knees and start lapping up all the blood with their tongues, rolling in the blood and guts and brains, cackling in glee at having once again thwarted an assault weapons ban, protecting the interests and profits of the gun manufacturers. Hmmm, maybe the gun manufacturer CEOs should also be forced to perform a similar community service?

Current front page of Huffpo. More deaths by gun last week alone in this country than our closest runner up for murders (if I recall my numbers correctly) has in a year.

You haven’t proven that people “the world over” watch the same programming and play the same games that people here do. That’s why I don’t accept your premise as a fact. Do people “the world over” watch the same cable programming as people here do? I don’t know if they do or not. My impression is that people in some countries overseas are less tolerant of violent programming than we are here, just as people here are less tolerant of nudity and sex in programming than they are in a lot of other places. I have read there is a less violent version of “Dawn of the Dead,” for example, that is shown in Europe. So, I just don’t accept the premise that everyone everywhere else watches the same things that people here watch.

Is there something I said that suggests I would disagree with that?

Amazing how that works, isn’t it?

First, it was Tuezday’s premise. Second, you are arguing from ignorance, and that is a fallacy. Check your information, don’t just run on “impressions.”

The games you mention are M-rated, only sold to adults. If children play them, it is the parent’s approval and purchasing that allows it. Passing a law is censorship. It has failed in state courts and SCOTUS.

That’s not my intent. I don’t like them any more than you do. By all means, continue talking about the NRA.

I am ignorant, but you are right just because you say so. I see.

Perhaps I am wrong on this, but I thought the SCOTUS ruled you cannot restrict the games to minors, only indecent materials because it is ‘customary,’ as Scalia put it. But perhaps I’m mistaken. I will double check on that.

Well, then, I apologize for responding to your comments. I won’t do it again.

exactly.

Well, when you make a profit selling the guns to both the good guys and the bad guys, any gun battle looks pretty cherry I suppose. Do they check the color of the hats at the time of sale, or can they see anything beyond the green of the bills?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/27/scotus.video.games/index.html

No, they can’t or don’t want to, but maybe they should.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade

We aren’t the worst in the world, but right now it sure seems like it..

My reaction to the not-funny-at-all display from the NRA yesterday:

Americans have to make it a lot harder on people who represent people who sell guns. For example, bullets should be flying passed them as they speak at the podium.

The results of the NRA’s 20-year stranglehold on politicians have not been good.

For example, extreme gun violence again yesterday in PA:

4 dead, including shooter, in central Pennsylvania

while LaPierre was at the podium

If the people infected by the poisonous video games games couldn’t find assault rifles, high capacity clips and hundreds of bullets, they wouldn’t be able to commit mass killings.

We should do what we can.

Suppose we send a shrink out to talk to anyone who has more than a certain number of guns, bullets or high capacity clips or kevlar armor.

LaPierre needs medicine…lots and lots of psychotropic medicine.

How small-minded can La Pierre be? An armed guard in every school? C’mon! How about an armed drone over every school?

Those horrible events, which sent some officers with guns who responded to the gunman’s rampage to the hospital with glass in their eyes and other wounds, happened while LaPierre was at the podium?

I know nothing about the circumstances of two of the victims, but a third only got out of his car following a car accident with the armed rampaging lunatic and was shot to death for doing what any of us would have done (not realizing that the other driver is an armed rampaging lunatic).

Why do you hate Xmas mall-goers, and Sikh temple worshipers, and Colorado theater attendees? We need MOAR DRONZ everywhere, not only above schools. And above HOAM SKUULS too!

a fine example of someone who really needs psychotropic medicine and an appropriate use of them.

unfortunately, that’s another industry that cares more about profits than public safety, in this case an industry that profits when people who don’t need psychotropic medicines are pumped full of them anyway. I think such widespread use of these medicines is part of the problem.

Well, if I’m reading a few stories today correctly, it looks like you’re going to get your wish.

No, not home schools. As Pam noted earlier this week, Home Schools have a divine shield over them, according to a Tennessee pastor:

But I’m going to tell you something, I’ve never seen a police officer or a medal detector at a home school. Never. Amen. Now, there’s plenty of guns at my home school. Amen. I guarantee you we’re not going to have a mass shooting at any of the schools that are represented in this building today. I guarantee you, if there is a shooting, it won’t last very long. Amen.

Pam’s conclusion: “The fact is, this nutbag garbage won’t stop. These people are not tethered to reality.”

See also LaPierre and his world filled with Demons.

Peterr, LaPierre isn’t the only one at NRA with demons. Keene, the new president, has a whole family with demons. His son is in jail for a road rage shooting and his wife is suspected of embezzling $400k from the American Conservative Union (not that that’s a bad thing).

It all makes me want to scream, but I’m in an airport so I’d probably be arrested.

Ex-wife, not wife, and she pleaded guilty to stealing from the ACU while Keene was heading it.

I’m not sure when they got divorced. Keene’s wiki is completely vacant when it comes to anyone but himself. No mention of personal life, wife/ex-wife, kids, etc. Why, it’s almost as if someone is making sure messy details are not included . . .

How bad was LaPierre’s performance yesterday?

It goaded the usually-timid-and-tepid editorialists of the New York Times to write this:

The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole

Representative sample:

Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard — just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians had started firing weapons in the Aurora movie theater.

In the 62 mass-murder cases over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. We have known for many years that a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High School in 1999 and fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive. He missed four times.

People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. Police officers know that firing a weapon is a huge risk; that’s why they avoid doing it. In August, New York City police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building. They killed him and wounded nine bystanders.

Shoot ‘em up Road Rager

I agree. I’m all for more gun control, but I’m tired of this knee jerk reaction — not yours — that says media violence is irrelevant.

Wayne speech was representative of his organization’s goal: Promote manufacture, distribution and sales of guns and ammunition. Wayne does not represent gun owners but gun manufacturers. NRA members are being duped if they think anything otherwise.

I heard someone being interviewed by Michael Eric Dyson say that La Pierre was suggesting that we install someone like George Zimmerman in every school.