(Dobbs) What Are They Thinking At The NRA?
Better to uncompromisingly protect the Second Amendment than to protect us.
How do you think the leaders of the NRA first reacted Tuesday afternoon when news reached them of the elementary school shootings in Texas?
Would you guess that their first reaction was, “Oh my god, what a horrible tragedy this is for those families?” Or, “Oh my god, what a horrible tragedy this could be for us. How can we fight off the inevitable new calls for gun control?”
I seldom speculate, but indulge me here: it was the second reaction, not the first. Yes, the NRA’s uncompromising leaders and its militant members must surely also mourn the deaths of those children, but if history is any guide, their first instinct when more got gunned down Tuesday was to protect what they define as their unbridled, unchecked, unimpeded Second Amendment rights.
As we know from the sorrowful saga of massacres in America, the NRA gets its talking points out to its followers almost as fast as the murderers pull their triggers. We heard those talking points within hours of Tuesday’s shootings.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz cried crocodile tears and professed, “We’re all completely sickened and heartbroken,” but then went into battle mode: “Inevitably when there's a murderer of this kind, you see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens.” Just in case it strikes you as relevant, Cruz got $300,000 from the gun lobby for his last campaign, more than any other congressional candidate in the country.
His colleague, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, also a beneficiary of NRA largesse, was more explicit about Republican intransigence on guns: “What we need to avoid is the reflexive reaction we have, to say this could all be solved by not having guns in anyone's hands.”
Oh yes it might. That’s called common sense.
Arizona’s far-right Representative Paul Gosar— he’s the one who tweeted a meme last year showing him killing liberal Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez— even went beyond the conventional NRA rubbish and had the gall to shift the blame, tweeting that the shooter was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien.” He wasn’t.
But the hypocrisy of these people was epitomized by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made a floor speech today depicting the shooter in Texas as a “deranged young man” and a “maniac”— all tragically true. How else could you describe him? Within a week of his 18th birthday, as he posted his evil plans on the internet, he was able to legally purchase two assault rifles and 375 rounds of ammunition. But did McConnell offer a single suggestion that would make it harder for a maniac like this— or the one who killed ten people the week before at a supermarket in Buffalo, or countless others— to get their hands on these weapons of war? No. Not a word.
Do you know the last time Congress actually supported a major bill about guns? It was the year 2005, the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” but here’s the irony: as the name implies, it wasn’t written to make us safer from guns, it was written to make gun manufacturers safer from us, preventing us from suing them if we’re the victims of the guns they make. President George W. Bush signed it into law.
The last major legislation to control the epidemic of guns? You have to go back to The Brady Handgun Violence Act of 1993, which required background checks before a licensed dealer or importer or manufacturer could sell a gun. But loopholes persist to this day. Then in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, better known as the assaults weapon ban. Ten years later though, it expired, and despite several attempts, never passed again.
Nor has anything else.
So kids like the school shooter in Texas, and the supermarket shooter in Buffalo, and a long line of murderous maniacs before them, can put their hands on weapons suitable for a slaughter. As President Biden rightly asked Tuesday night after his 17-hour flight home from Asia, “What in God's name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?”
Which raises these questions: is society safer with more guns, or fewer? Right now, there are more guns in America than people. Are we safer when criminally-minded citizens can easily get their hands on a gun, or the other way around? Are we safer if a little extra bureaucracy for law-abiding gun buyers means a little extra burden for those intent on murder? Are we safer if our society is flooded with guns like no other society on earth? Or are we safer if there is some sensible effort to manage the floodgates.
The NRA’s appalling answer is, the more guns, the better.
Its mantra is, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Ironic, isn’t it then, that when Donald Trump addresses an annual NRA conference this Friday in Houston— only hours from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas— no guns will be allowed in the room. Maybe, if the NRA is right, it’s people they shouldn’t allow.
Just last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed seven laws loosening the limits on gun ownership and bragged, “Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment.”
That tells you what we’re stuck with. He and his ilk care more about protecting the Second Amendment than they care about protecting victims shot by the very weapons the Second Amendment supposedly safeguards.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Someone wrote that gun-loving Americans have decided that the deaths of children is not too high a price to pay to have unlimited guns in the US
Greg, I'm pretty darn sure you've already seen this from Heather Cox Williamson, but just in case not, I thought it quite cogent. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-24-2022?utm_source=email&s=r