Yay!

My unbridled derision of the NRA should be well-known to readers of The Square Peg. Asked to choose the single most-destructive entity in America, I would place it second, only after right-wing conservatism.

Which isn't bad for an industry trade association which modestly refers to itself as a non-profit organization seeking only to promote gun safety. Awww. Isn't that touching? If the NRA is promoting gun safety, all of us need a bulletproof vest—now.

That's because more than anything, the NRA is wildly expert at stoking fear and in turn, gun sales. Which is kind of odd for something claiming to be a non-profit interested in gun safety.

Also odd is the influence this little non-profit holds over Republican senators and representatives. I mean, how is it a little non-profit amasses the millions and millions of dollars necessary to finance campaigns for gun-friendly candidates?

Definitely something that makes you go “Hmmmm.”

As recent suits filed by state's attorneys in New York and in the District of Columbia show, the NRA has been a very profitable non-profit. Enough that CEO Wayne (spit) LaPierre (spit) has created a cool seventeen-million dollar golden parachute for himself in case the heat ever gets to be too much.

And by heat, I'm not referring to the multiple and extravagant trips to the Bahamas funded by NRA donors, either.

Under LaPierre's tutelage, the NRA has gone from a twenty-eight million-dollar surplus in 2015 to thirty-six million-dollar deficit just three years later. It should be obvious Democrats aren't the only ones who know a little something about deficit spending!

That's a sixty-four million-dollar swing, people. Also obvious it that a whole lot of money is coming from somewhere. Gosh. I wonder where?

The twin suits allege that the NRA is a fraud. That it is a for-profit political action committee that routinely flouts the conventions which bind non-profits.

Admittedly, calling the NRA a fraud is akin to describing Jeffrey Dahmer as anti-social. But it's a start. And a great one.

The toxic, wretched embarrassment that is the NRA needs to be ground underfoot like a cigarette butt. While current president Carolyn (spit) Meadows (spit) accuses New York State's Attorney Letitia James of being a—gasp!—political opportunist, one can only wonder what the United States would look like were it not for thirty years of mo' guns is mo' better gun policy.

It may require sex toys, but I pray Ms. James and Mr. Racine are able to fuck the NRA up its pasty white ass.

Again?

What's left to say?

A noisy, selfish minority has brought carnage and mayhem to our streets. Fear into our homes. And terror into our hearts.

We are bleeding sorrow.

If this minority had recently crossed our borders, our president would be on the verge of a cardiovascular episode. He'd be apoplectic. The keypad on his phone would have fused from heated and incessant Tweeting.

But they didn't. This minority is a home-grown terrorist group. Ironically, it is also a reliable source of Republican funding.

The same party that wants to criminalize women for seeking abortions stubbornly refuses to curtail, much less acknowledge, these terrorist's leading role in our ongoing national tragedy.

If you can make that add up, would you please let me know what kind of calculator you're using?

Think about it: can you even imagine the law enforcement response to a organization that flooded our nation with firearms in the manner of the NRA? Much less if that organization were composed of Middle-Easterners or African-Americans or Latinos?

Neither can I.

Yet the NRA does. Unfettered. Undisturbed. Untroubled. The NRA has made its position clear: it doesn't care. Not about your life. Not about that of your spouse. And not about those of your children.

What the NRA does care about is maintaining its position as God's chosen moral authority and the country's supreme arbitrator on all things pertaining to the Second Amendment.

Our government is fond of saying it doesn't negotiate with terrorists. Yet we continue to negotiate with the NRA. We bargain in good faith and with well-intentioned empathy for the white-knuckled fear of its constituency.

But the NRA steadfastly refuses any accommodation whatsoever.

It's time to get tough with the NRA.

It's time for the tail to stop wagging the dog.

It's time to realize their absolute refusal to compromise means—and can only mean—one thing. 

Fuck off.

And we have. For such a very, very long time.

We deserve to come and go as we please. To attend movies and go dancing and hear concerts and go to church without the fear of ending up on a slab.

Amendments don't require thuggish, sociopathic businessmen to keep them viable. We must crush the NRA. And we must crush it now.

Nothing less than freedom—real freedom—is at stake.

Guilty!

The Court of Trump has rendered its verdict: guilty!

Shame on you Cecil Rosenthal!

Shame on you David Rosenthal!

Shame on you Irving Younger!

Shame on you Melvin Wax!

Shame on you Rose Mallinger!

Shame on you Bernice Simon!

Shame on you Sylvan Simon!

Shame on you Jerry Rabinowitz!

Shame on you Joyce Fienberg!

Shame on you Richard Gottfried!

Shame on you Daniel Stein!

Shame on you for attending baby-naming services in an unprotected synagogue! Shame on you for your ignorance! Shame on you for your naivete!

Is this a pre-meditated attempt by left-leaning radicals to make the NRA, assault weapons and our president look bad? Is it?

How dare you get in the way of bullets fired by a licensed gun-owner exercising his second-amendment rights!

Let's be clear: the NRA is not the fall guy here. This is on you—one hundred percent.

It was your choice to attend services in an unsecured synagogue knowing the danger. Knowing that malcontents like Robert Bowers—with virtually unrestricted access to assault weapons—lurked somewhere...out there.

You should have had armed guards.

You should have had metal detectors.

You should have had face recognition software, even though it wouldn't have done any good.

You should have been paranoid.

So yes, this is on you. Don't you dare try and pin this on our president, who merely voices the feelings of our downtrodden white majority for political gain.

That is his right.

Maybe this will help you see the light: we don't have a gun problem—we have a security problem.

Maybe next time you will think twice before going out in public without armed guards, bulletproof vests and a cache of assault weapons of your very own.

This is America! Land of the free! 

Don't you understand?

The Former Senator from Pennsylvania Speaks

In a better world, Rick Santorum would know firsthand the horror of being trapped in a mass shooting. He would hear the screams and the fatal gunfire. Feel the blind, frantic panic that accompanies the realization that your life could end at any moment.

You would know, Mr. Santorum, what it is to be the target of a psychopathic human being bent on killing. And assisted by the NRA, able to.

It is my hope that this would reduce the likelihood of you accusing the too-young-to-vote survivors of the Parkland, FL. school shooting of “looking to someone else to solve their problem”, and perhaps make you a little more reluctant to suggest that they instead learn how to perform CPR.

(But I'm not holding my breath.)

Forty-eight hours later, public opinion polls—I mean your conscience—have you telling anyone who will listen that you erred in letting such a callous opinion escape the recesses of your oral cavity.

So relieved are you by this truth-telling that afterwards you even found occasion to joke: “I think Sanjay Gupta's job here at CNN is probably safe as being the medical commentator on things.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

While the gun crowd likes to claim it's the target of derision and disrespect from the gun control crowd even as NRA lead freak Wayne LaPierre rails at liberal “elites” for their supposed monopoly of victimhood, as evidenced by Mr. Santorum and others this is clearly not the case.

I can't get my brain around the fact that we are criticizing our kids for being upset by the carnage that is taking place within their schools. And then for acting on it. Even as we wag our fingers at them for playing violent computer games and dismiss them for being unduly absorbed by their iPhones. 

CPR classes excepted, what would you have them do, Mr. Santorum?

By now, it should be clear that with the gun crowd, nothing is off the table when it comes to defending our constitutional right to die suddenly and for no reason whatsoever at the end of a gun.

Defeating them is going to require sustained and passionate protest. Their guns are the lone source of their strength. Their guns are their esteem. Their guns are their lives.

You can imagine the sea change required to undo their clutching, white-knuckled angst. And then the evolved society that is the result of having done so. 

300 Million Guns Can't Be Wrong—Can They?

The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr is credited with coining the phrase “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

After a century, a decade and a year of unrivaled carnage, we in America are still debating why gun violence happens so often here and so seldom in the rest of the first world.

Mine is admittedly an uninformed, off-the-cuff, left field guesstimate, but I kind of think it might be the guns.

The security experts in the NRA keep telling us America's problem isn't the three-hundred million guns coursing through our national bloodstream, it's the billions of guns that aren't. 

Yes, despite what you see on the network news and on the Internet, America suffers from a gun deficiency.

Despite being oh-so-close to the one-gun-per-person ideal advocated by the NRA, America remains the most dangerous first world country on Earth. 

How can this be?

The experts need a re-think.

Allow them a sabbatical and some time to do some serious woodshedding, and they will emerge to inform us that no, the optimal ratio which will ensure America's safety is actually two to one.

Given still-more time, a mounting pile of bullet-riddled corpses and stubborn, unanswered questions and they will again retreat and again emerge.

This time they will explain that their critical error was in leaving one hand unarmed; that it is the one gun per hand model which will finally keep America safe and secure.

And despite the evidence all around us to the contrary, we will believe them.

Even past the point of there being anything to protect.

The Waiting Room

I was in a waiting room when I first heard the news. Yet another mass slaying had occurred. This time, fourteen were dead.

As the wall-mounted TV relayed the details, the faces of the half-dozen people within remained unconcerned as they sat absorbed by their smart phones.

“Wait, this isn't about me? OK.”

There was a disconnect from the people in Southern California, because they were in one place and we in another and it had happened to them and not to us.

Is this what the insularity of technology and social media hath wrought?

As the electronic media rehashed their facts over and over and over, I wondered what role they played in our emotional distancing. Like Aesop's boy who cried wolf, our media has certainly confirmed how quickly we can become calloused.

And me?

I become enraged when confronted with the specter of innocent people being pierced by metal projectiles fired by a stranger dozens or even hundreds of feet away. Especially when they are guilty only of existing.

I rage at the shooter, I rage at the NRA, I rage at the politicians who endorse this in exchange for campaign financing, and out of cowardice.

Instead of endlessly reciting stale facts, why doesn't our media contact Wayne LaPierre for his thoughts on the carnage?

“Mr. LaPierre, as CEO and Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, a special interest group which has tirelessly and unswervingly dedicated itself to the saturation of our country with all manner of guns and assault weapons, what—if anything—do you feel your connection to the events of this afternoon is?

Contrast for our viewers how much money the NRA spends promoting gun safety, which is ostensibly the NRA's reason for being, versus what it spends combating gun control legislation and the closing of big, fat loopholes which enable gun ownership?

Is this evidence of a country with far too many guns far too easily accessed, or as you have remarked in the past, a security problem? Which we hasten to point out in your definition means too many people with not enough guns.

Finally Mr. LaPierre, what would you tell the families of today's shooting victims? Their parents? Their spouses? Their children? Their siblings?”

This, of course, is fantasy. LaPierre would no more agree to appear than our corporate media would think of calling him.

I dream of handing out Thank You NRA! t-shirts in the wake of such events, if only to provoke new conversation. A different stream of thought.

Again I fantasize.

I ponder the inveterate sadness of our mass shooting statistics, and look at the confines of the waiting room. I wonder if it isn't a whole lot larger than I'm aware of.

Wayne's World

Seeing the Light

Some combination of you and me and us are going about this all wrong. There should be no more grieving faces. No more makeshift memorials. No more eulogies. No more somber testimonials.

The next time a dozen people have the gall to get in the way of a constitutionally-protected individual exercising their second amendment rights, we need to seize it as an opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade.

We need to expose the silver lining lurking in this cloud. We need to rejoice.

This isn’t a tragedy. It’s an expression of constitutional strength. Our second amendment is alive and kicking—even if twelve innocent people aren't.

As America’s BFF (NRA head Wayne LaPierre) put it yesterday, this isn’t a case of wanton gun violence further cheapening life in what many of us pretend is the greatest country in the world; it’s a tragic example of the urgent need for better security.

Which is kind of like saying it wasn’t the overflowing toilet that ruined your wooden floor, it was the fact the water happened to be wet.

(Wayne is the Super Fly of semantics. He splits hairs with the facile ease that Enrico Fermi once split atoms.)

So. Freed of our burdens and imbued with the knowledge that in Wayne's world, we need only fear not having enough guns, let us sing. Let us clap our hands and raise our voices in celebration.

The second amendment has never been more potent. Let us lift the world off its axis with our newfound joy. No more tears. No more regret.

We possess the means to kill, and kill we shall.