Bill Moyers/Michael Winship: The Madness of the NRA

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from Consortium News:


The Madness of the NRA
January 6, 2013

The American Right has fabricated a false narrative about the Second Amendment to justify the ongoing slaughter of children and thousands of other civilians across the United States. But the NRA’s pro-gun arguments sometimes even go beyond satire, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship explain.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship


We wrote and spoke about guns just a few days before Christmas, following the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. So did Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association. His now infamous, “no questions” press conference was the most stunning, cockeyed, one-man show since Clint Eastwood addressed that empty chair at the Republican National Convention. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he pronounced.

LaPierre might well have plagiarized his vision of a wholly armed nation from another “man of the people” of 40 years ago, the protagonist in the famous sit-com “All in the Family.” On a 1972 episode, when a local TV station comes out in favor of gun control, Archie Bunker hits the airwaves with an editorial rebuttal:

Archie Bunker: “Good evening, everybody. This here is Archie Bunker of 704 Hauser Street, veteran of the big war, speaking on behalf of guns for everybody. Now, question: what was the first thing that the Communists done when they took over Russia? Answer: gun control. And there’s a lot of people in this country want to do the same thing to us here in a kind of conspiracy, see. You take your big international bankers, they want to – whaddya call – masticate the people of this here nation like puppets on the wing, and then when they get their guns, turn us over to the Commies…

“Now I want to talk about another thing that’s on everybody’s minds today, and that’s your stick-ups and your skyjackings, and which, if that were up to me, I could end the skyjackings tomorrow. … All you gotta do is arm all your passengers. He ain’t got no more moral superiority there, and he ain’t gonna dare to pull out no rod. And then your airlines, they wouldn’t have to search the passengers on the ground no more, they just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip, and they just pick them up at the end! Case closed.” ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/01/06/the-madness-of-the-nra/

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