Gun Morality, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #321 | @MDWorld

April 8, 2013 Mike Gold 16 Comments

“I just read where somebody was killed with a paper bag and a knife. Now, are they going to ban paper bags and knives?”

This was the brilliant utterance of one of my fellow Nutmeggers in response to the passage of the new gun control laws in Connecticut. Since he was courageous enough to voice the argument, I’ll take it seriously and respond accordingly.

Yes. If a paper bag and a knife can kill 26 people inside of five minutes, then by all means, ban the lethal paper-bag-and-knife combination.

The NRA and its shill, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (amusingly located in Newtown Connecticut), predictably has been up in arms about the new laws in Connecticut that would prohibit sales of high capacity ammunition magazines, require universal background checks, establish a dangerous weapon offender registry, require eligibility certificates for the purchase of long guns and ammunition, expand the state safe storage law, increase penalties for trafficking and illegal possession will be increased, and add a mental health professional and a retired Superior Court Judge to the Board of Firearm Permit Examiners.

Of course, these organizations took out ads in newspapers here in Fairfield County that were fraught with panic-inducing lies: absolute lies; not just typically extreme interpretations of truthiness.

And then the NRA and the NSSF did something else. These purveyors of paranoia made robo-calls to people in the area, including people in Newtown, including people in Newtown whose kids were in those classrooms, including parents and relatives of kids and teachers who were killed in those classrooms, telling them that if these laws passed we might all wind up dead. Non-profit organizations are exempted from no-call lists and, yes, the appropriate response to this is “define non-profit.”

The move backfired completely. Last Wednesday, these laws were ratified by the Connecticut state congress.

As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha, ha!” Or to refer to a more time-honored animation meme, that stick of dynamite blew up in their lying faces.

“Guns don’t kill. People kill.” Yep, that’s absolutely correct. Guns don’t kill. People such as Adam Lanza who decided to discard his 10 shot magazines for those containing 30 shots and take a half dozen of those magazines to a public school and fire 154 bullets at teachers and small children within five minutes and killing 26 of them – these are the people who kill.

There is absolutely no doubt that had Adam Lanza had to reload more than three times – he would have had to reload at least 15 times if he took the standard magazines, assuming the percentage of magazines that jammed remained consistent – he could not have slaughtered as many people. Certainly not before the police arrived.

The NRA’s response is to put armed guards in the schools. Well, many schools have armed guards, so their purported use as intimidation factors is non-existent. Besides, if I wanted to slaughter a gaggle of children and I was concerned about being shot (and recent history has shown us this killers are not so concerned), I’d just drive my pickup truck to the parking lot and wait for the school bell to ring. From a crouched position, I could probably take out that armed guard during my spree, probably before I had to reload.

Whereas I’ve long identified rabid Wayne LaPierre as a great evil on par with Josef Stalin, in the past I have defended much of the National Rifle Association’s work and I have, and I remain, a supporter of the right to own guns. But now, after their recent actions, to support the NRA is to support LaPierre’s mindlessly deadly agenda. In their post-Newtown actions the NRA has proven themselves to be more than simply imbeciles who think the paper-bag-and-knife argument is clever or salient.

The U.S. criminal code defines “aiding and abetting” as “(a) Whoever aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures the commission of an offense, is punishable as a principal, (and) (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense, is punishable as a principal.”

The NRA has proven itself to be guilty of accessory after the fact. They are aiding and abetting Adam Lanza and his ilk.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.