Hey Wayne, you forgot the Zombie Apocalypse.
I can boil this all down for you pretty easily; we all need guns, because people are pouring over our open southern border and setting up gangs and being al Qaeda (because Obama's not doing anything about them lawless mezkins, you know. He wants to give them amnesty). Pretty soon, the entire country will be like Brooklyn after Hurricane Sandy, with looting and killing and who knows what all, because Obama's bankrupting 'murika so bad that we won't be able to afford any police and criminals will run wild, seeking out the unarmed to prey on and that could be your family and do you want that? Well, do you? For the sweet love of God, you need a gun OR WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!
Yes, it really is that racist and paranoid and partisan and cowardly. If this is what's going on in the average NRA member's head, they totally shouldn't be allowed to have firearms. They would be quite literally insane. If there are any NRA members out there reading this, is this really the way you want to be portrayed to everyone else? Because this is the stereotype: a nut who's so afraid of the dark that he needs lots and lots of guns to shoot all the monsters. "Lapierre sounds more every day like a parody of himself: a hysterical old man who started out yelling at kids to get off his lawn and now has barricaded himself indoors with five years worth of canned food and shooting irons," Ed Kilgore comments.
If you're disinclined to read Wayne's apocalyptic fear porn (and who could blame you?), you can get the skinny version at ThinkProgress, where Zack Beauchamp and Ian Millhiser have helpfully boiled it all down to "The Nine Most Insane Quotes From The NRA’s New Apocalyptic Op-Ed." And they are insane.
If this is the best argument against gun control, then I say control away. LaPierre's problems -- and those of people who think like him -- can't be solved by piles and piles of firearms. They'd benefit more from psychiatric outpatient care, with a regimen of powerful anti-psychotic pharmaceuticals. Another note to the NRA members reading this -- other people don't think this way. Fear is not the theme music of our existence. Most people actually enjoy their lives and don't spend a minute preparing for all the people they think they'll inevitably have to kill.
And LaPierre does argue that this is all nearly inevitable. "President Obama is leading this country to financial ruin, borrowing over a trillion dollars a year for phony 'stimulus' spending and other payoffs for his political cronies," he writes. "Nobody knows if or when the fiscal collapse will come, but if the country is broke, there likely won’t be enough money to pay for police protection. And the American people know it."
This is crazypants survivalist nutjob stuff, believed in so strongly by the mother of Adam Lanza that she stocked up on guns and ammmo, building a nice little private arsenal -- just like Wayne LaPierre recommends. That collection of "protective" weapons was used to kill her, then twenty-six human beings at Sandy Hook Elementary -- twenty of whom were children. In other words, far from preventing crime and protecting people, it was exactly this kind of thinking that turned an elementary school into a bloody crime scene.
That's the world LaPierre thinks we should prepare to defend ourselves in; a world where gun nuts need guns to protect themselves from other gun nuts who need guns to protect themselves other guns nuts who... lather, rinse, repeat. It's a prophecy that can only become self-fulfilling if enough people really believe. If enough people share Wayne LaPierre's vision, we really can live in that world where you will need a gun to protect yourself and your family from other people with guns.
That's Wayne La Pierre's America -- and it is sick.
-Wisco
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