two wrongs
"In a race to the bottom, many conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate, and offend every standard of civilized society, by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty right into our homes," LaPierre (pictured) said.
The Race to the bottom is a capitalist race for the consumer dollar, and LaPierre is a front-runner. The NRA might have the word “Association” in their title, leading you to believe these are citizens arguing issues of rights, but a more honest acronym would be the NRI, the National Rifle Industry. Guns and ammunition are big business and they stand to loose a lot in the face of weapons bans. Like the cigarette industry, another industry that profits through knowingly peddling lethal weapons, they are willing to invest a lot to get you to believe that it is somehow not their product that is harmful but its misuse.
If LaPierre seems to be pointing the blame at his best advertisers, it’s because he knows the film and the video game industries will receive no more than the sort of verbal slap on the wrist he himself is dolling out, and in times of crises one needs a scapegoat.
His solution to solving school gun shooting sprees is unsurprising; he says we should place more guns in schools, in the hands of the “good guys” (his words). By “we,” he means taxpayers. That’s the greatest irony in this; LaPierre says “...can’t we afford to put a police officer in every school?” This from a man whose political party has put into question the expense of teachers, textbooks, and educational television. Obviously they (the NRA and the GOP) have a very altered view of the function of schools, since they think we waste money invested in improving education, but that investing in increased security is a no-brainer.
The real scapegoat here is our schools. In spite of how little is invested in education on a government level, schools are pictured as a drain on the economy in hard times. While military spending (the largest investor in the NRI) balloons larger and larger regardless of the jobless rate. And now LaPierre wants to ask that school budgets be divided even more to dole out for full-time police presence in every school? If he believes that is an answer, and that it is a small price to pay for our children’s safety, why doesn’t he and the NRA/NRI foot the bill from the huge profits made off guns?
Why? Because he wants cops in schools so that there is more people to sell guns to (SELL not GIVE). They will sell guns to the cops, and then to the parents and teachers who see the cops and think, “Is one armed policeman really enough?” And then they will sell guns to the students, who learn from the cops, teachers, and their parents that guns are good in the right hands. So then there are even more guns being sold, and if a few fall into the wrong hands, well, all the better to test the theory that an armed public is a safe public.
The truth is glorifying the gun’s power to solve the problem, will only make guns more present and increase the problem. The problem being not only that guns are weapons that could murder you versus the notion they could defend you from murder; the problem being that the people profiting off of gun sales really don’t care who buys guns, only that they are bought, and in great numbers.
LaPierre could have made any statement he wanted to today, including simply expressing sympathy to the victims and their families. Instead he gave his first pitch in a plan to sell more guns. This is capitalism at its ugliest: a man capitalizing on the fears that his very product is largely responsible for, and showing no remorse