A few days ago, after almost a full week of silence, the National Rifle Association (NRA) issued a press release addressing the December 14 mass murder in Connecticut, in which 26 lives were lost, including those of 20 six- and seven-year-olds. In their press release, the NRA promised that they were, “prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.” Well, at a press conference held in Washington, DC this afternoon, we got a pretty good sense as to just how “meaningful” those contributions would be.
Standing behind a podium in the Willard Hotel ballroom, before hundreds of reporters who were instructed not to ask questions, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre aggressively avoided even the slightest hint of responsibility, insisting that this horrible event happened not because too many military-style weapons are in circulation, but because we have “a national media machine that rewards (deranged and evil people) with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave” coupled with “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people… through vicious, violent video games.” Here’s a clip from LaPierre’s speech:
“In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.
A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18.
And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away”…
[LaPierre’s full statement can be found here.]
But LaPierre, I assume because he loves the 1st Amendment as much as he does the 2nd, doesn’t call for limits to be imposed on the entertainment industry. No, he takes the opportunity to sell more guns, saying, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” We should, he seems to argue, accept that there’s evil in the word, which is being coaxed along by large corporations, and be prepared to meet it with overwhelming force. Then, with the stage having been set, LaPierre offered his “meaningful contribution” to the national conversation, calling upon Congress to act immediately, “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school.” And, he said, the NRA would be there to help however necessary.
The NRA, said LaPierre, “as America’s preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years,” would be more than happy to lead this campaign, which they’ve christened the National School Shield Emergency Response Program. The NRA would, according to LaPierre, handle everything from the training of these several hundred thousand armed guards, and putting school access controls in place, to drafting designs for America’s next-generation schools, which, one can assume, will be virtually impenetrable… One would assume that the NRA would be compensated for playing such a critical role in safeguarding our nation’s children, but LaPierre didn’t mention that.
[note: One other thing that LaPierre didn’t mention — there was an armed guard on the grounds of Columbine High School on the day that school was attacked in 1999. The guard, Neil Gardner, exchanged fire with one of the gunmen from 60 yards away, but failed to keep him from entering the school, where he and an accomplice murdered 13.]
And, with that, LaPierre introduced former Congressman Asa Hutchinson, the man who, we were told, would be leading the effort for the NRA, as the National Director of the National School Shield Program. Neither man answered reporters’ questions, but Hutchinson, in his prepared comments, added a little more detail to the plan, as it had been put forward by LaPierre. Most interestingly, Hutchinson said that, for the system to work, you wouldn’t even need to hire police officers, as volunteers could do the trick. (Hiring police officers could be cost-prohibitive, as there are approximately 98,817 public schools in the United States, and God knows how many busses, each of which, one would imagine, would need to be protected as well.) Here’s a quote from Hutchinson:
“…If a school decides, for whatever reason, that it doesn’t want, or need, armed security personnel, that of course is a decision to be made by the parents of the local school board at the local level. The second point I’d like to make is that this will be a program that does not depend upon massive funding from local authorities or the federal government. Instead it will make use of local volunteers serving in their own communities… Whether they’re retired police, retired military, or rescue personnel, I think there are people in every community in this country who would be happy to serve, if only someone would ask them, and gave them the training and certifications to do so…”
And, at this point in the conversation, I think it’s worth reminding folks just how well the whole “volunteer armed security” thing worked out for Trayvon Martin this summer. Do we really want trigger-happy volunteer tough guys walking around our kids’ schools with loaded weapons, questioning our children about their comings and goings?
I can see the appeal of a relatively quick fix that gives parents the temporary illusion of safety where their children are concerned, but I can’t help but think that, if we follow this course of action, we might just be creating a more serious problem. The analogy that comes to mind is that of a community which, in hopes of eliminating one invasive species, introduces a more lethal invasive species into their local ecosystem. The hope is that the second species will be more easily dealt with than the first, but it’s almost guaranteed not to be the case.
[Video of Hutchinson’s complete address can be found here.]
The response to this “defensive” and “paranoid” vision put forward by the NRA, from what I’ve seen online, has been universally unenthusiastic. Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers, for instance, called the proposal “irresponsible and dangerous.” And Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post called it, “absurd, unbelievable, tragic, obscene… evil.” I could go on, but I suspect that most of you already know that this idea is terrible, and will join me, over the coming months, in fighting it. The last thing this country needs are more guns in schools. Even if we’re just talking about one armed person in each school, that’s almost 100,000 guns, and what are the odds that bad things would happen, especially if we’re talking about unpaid volunteers being the ones with their fingers on the triggers? How long will it be before we start hearing stories about fathers of Muslim students being shot for “looking like terrorists,” or guns being accidentally discharged? I’d argue that it’s not worth the risk, especially when there are other means available to us. As we discussed yesterday, the evidence indicates that fewer guns in circulation means fewer gun deaths. Folks on the right argue that insane people will still find a way to do harm, and that’s true, but it will almost certainly be decidedly less lethal. Case in point – at roughly the same time that this gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary, taking the lives of 20 children, a similarly deranged man entered a school in China, wielding a knife. He slashed 22 children. Happily, though, in that case, they all survived.
[note: The image above is mine. I apologize in advance if any of my gun-owning friends get their feeling hurt.]
update: The best response to LaPierre that I’ve seen thus far.
