New York Times blasts NRA, LaPierre anew

AKSARBENT doesn't ever recalling reading an editorial in the Times as pugnacious as this one or with as insulting a headline (slyly evoking comparisons between the gun group and Sadam Hussein). Published yesterday, it ripped the NRA and its president up one side and down the other. You really should read the piece in its entirety. Of course Wayne LaPierre is an easy target; he has been certifiable for a long time. Go here to see why George H.W. Bush quit the NRA in 1995 specifically because of a foaming piece by then executive vice president LaPierre.
     Here in Nebraska, Senator-elect Deb Fischer and Congressmen Adrian Smith, Jeff Fortenberry and Lee Terry are all endorsed by the NRA, and all have 92% ratings.

Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and video game players.

      The N.R.A., which devotes itself to destroying compromise on guns, is blameless. So are unscrupulous and unlicensed dealers who sell guns to criminals, and gun makers who bankroll Mr. LaPierre so he can help them peddle ever-more-lethal, ever-more-efficient products, and politicians who kill even modest controls over guns.

      His solution to the proliferation of guns, including semiautomatic rifles designed to kill people as quickly as possible, is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards.

      ...We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob... Any town officials or school principals who take up the N.R.A. on that offer should be fired.

      Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard...

      In the 62 mass-murder cases over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. We have known for many years that a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High School in 1999 and fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive. He missed four times.

      People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts... In August, New York City police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building. They killed him and wounded nine bystanders.