I was going to write about this, but then I got the article by Megan McArdle and she covered it as well, so I was going to leave it …………….. but now I’ve decided I need to put my two cents worth in as well!

Enough, and maybe even far too much, has been said about that shooting in Connecticut, but one statement struck me as being delivered straight from the Twilight Zone.

The executive director of an American gun rights group says there is “blood on the hands” of gun control advocates and politicians because of laws that would not allow teachers in Friday’s deadly mass shooting in Connecticut to carry guns in their school.

“In addition to the gunman, blood is on the hands of members of Congress and the Connecticut legislators who voted to ban guns from all schools in Connecticut (and most other states),” Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America wrote in an article that was published as an op-ed in USA Today. “They are the ones who made it illegal to defend oneself with a gun in a school when that is the only effective way of resisting a gunman.”

This is about as stupid as the guy from the N.R.A. who said a few months ago: “If some people in the theatre had been carrying weapons, then the gunman would never had shoot all those people!”

Imagine that scene, boys and girls ………………, a bunch of people with handguns blasting away at each other in a darkened theatre, where in all the confusion, no on knows who is who, or what is what!

Only in the 1970s would the NRA and conservatives start to argue that the Second Amendment guaranteed individual gun possession. Piggybacking cleverly on the minority and women’s rights revolutions, the NRA claimed that gun owners, too, were endowed with “rights” that were protected by the Constitution.

The group also created a giant lobbying and publicity apparatus to spread this new doctrine. Reflecting on the NRA’s politicking, Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”


But Burger had retired by the time he made that statement, and the NRA was on the rise. Today, millions of Americans take it for granted that the Constitution protects individual gun rights. So do their legislatures and courts, which have discovered a meaning in the Second Amendment that earlier generations never imagined
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Matter of fact folks, instead of just one guy, I think I will make anyone who is a member of the NR.A. our “Asshole of the Day!”