After the NRA’s insane press conference on Friday, I’d say the happiest person in America is Charlotte Allen. Everyone’s going to get off her back for awhile.
Wayne LaPierre’s press conference -which, due to no questions being taken, was no press conference at all- was a special kind of wingnuttery, petulant and whiny and uncommonly vicious. Virtually everyone on Earth- especially Hollywood, video games and “the media”- was blamed for the Sandy Hook massacre, with the exception of guns and anyone who uses them.
As usual with this sort of thing, his examples of the horrible culture causing violence included “Natural Born Killers”- a movie from 1994 that’s almost never on TV- and a video game that looks like it was made for the NES in 1988.
Worst of all, one gets the sense that LaPierre thinks he’s the victim. No one has suffered in the last week like HE has.
The insane proposals were plentiful- a federal mandate for an armed guard in every school (small government!). A “national database of the mentally ill?” That’s more destructive government intrusion into innocent people’s lives than the worst the NRA has ever feared about gun restrictions.
I’m no fan of Code Pink, who interrupted the speech several times, so it says a lot that the NRA made them look like heroes.
I speak as someone who’s not sure how I feel about gun control, or what the best solution is for the problem of school massacres. But the NRA- which has spent the last several years lying through their teeth about Obama and the U.N.’s plans to take every last gun away- is absolutely not on the side of good.
That vile, nauseating speech was the biggest gift the NRA could’ve possibly given their political enemies. They deserve to be absolutely radioactive.
Stephen Silver, Writer 