Befuddled or brilliant?

Last Friday the NRA responded to the Newtown shooting with a proposal “to help make sure this never happens again” that included attacks against video games, violent movies, and called for an active national database of the mentally ill and armed police officers in every school.

As I mentioned in a Tweet at the time, “Way to go @NRA. Trash the First Amendment in an attempt to save the Second. We all lose.”

And alienating all the gamers? Grrr… Now that was a big mistake.

One could go on to criticize the police office suggestion as well. How could they be paid for? Wouldn’t they just be the first ones shot in a similar attack? Isn’t this another step closer to a police state?

And a national database of the mentally ill? That’s not going to encourage people to get help or for family and friends to feel good about pushing someone to get treatment. Way to alienate still another group of people that don’t need to be alienated.

Even traditionally strong supporters of the NRA had some criticism of the NRA statement.

How can an organization that urges “Vote Freedom First” take a swing at video games and violent movies and hope to be taken seriously?

nra_freedom2

It’s like they are hopelessly confused or even incoherent.

On the other hand there are people saying (H/T to Sebastian):

Suddenly, the gun banners had to argue two ridiculous positions. The first was that allowing trained educators or police having weapons in schools is a danger. The problem is that people generally like and trust teachers and cops. The second position was even worse, that armed personnel or police are somehow utterly useless against untrained, amateur creeps who seek to confront six-year olds. All over America, millions of parents noted how none of the wealthy gun banners were disbanding their personal security teams and thought, “You know, I think I’d like having a cop around my kid too.”

Particularly amusing are the liberals who transform into green eyeshades misers with the public purse when it comes to cops in schools. The folks who can’t spend enough dough on fudge-smeared, patriarchy-challenging performance artists suddenly become thrifty Scotsmen when it comes to doling out a few shillings to put a cop on campus.

You know, he does sort of have a point there. Instead of pushing for the banning of guns or magazines our opponents have been deflected onto other topics. And that might just put us into an easily winnable position.

I don’t know if it that was befuddlement or brilliance but in the short term it just might have been a winning play.

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5 thoughts on “Befuddled or brilliant?

  1. Pingback: SayUncle » More stuff on the NRA and armed guards at schools

  2. This is a matter of defining the culture, Joe. Perhaps I should say “restoring” the culture. The depravity and loss of civility that the violent video games teach and the violent movies extol as “good” must be considered in this equation.

    It will prove very instructive, since the Left always seems to be willing to chip away at the Civil Right of bearing arms, but goes in the other direction on the Civil Right of “free expression”, fortifying it at every nauseating opportunity.

    You have asked the question of the Left before, “what Civil Right will you take next”. Now your question comes full circle. Don’t try to sell me that the liberal position on “anything goes, it’s Free Expression” would have been tolerated by the Founders, because their writings demonstrate that they cherished their cultural conservatism, their generation even coining the word “libertine” as a negative to describe those who would change the culture too rapidly. The etymology of the word comes from our word “liberty”, but at the same time, it delineated a specific kind of liberty that was NOT desirable in the culture.

    Given a few generations of sanity and restoration of the precepts of the Founders, we COULD restore the culture, but for the present, it’s probably best that we stop digging the hole that is swallowing it.

    This is the long way of saying that, yes, there will have to be SOME restrictions on what we consider “free expression”. If we fail to put some restrictions in place, we have failed the culture AND the Constitution in one fell swoop.

  3. Oh so now they don’t want cops in schools? … but when Clinton was in, they did want cops in schools: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/12/21/Flashback-Clinton-Cops-in-Schools
    Talk about having a “John Kerry moment”…
    I was for cops in schools before I was against cops in schools…

    Psst hey anti-rights people – hint hint hint.. Ya can’t have it both ways and have your arguments still remain relevant.

    These people baffle me, there must be something funny in their kool-aid water…

  4. All the vitriol directed at the NRA is a sign LaPierre “spoke Truth to Power.” Applause indicates you spoke what the anti-liberty lickspittle lackeys want to hear.

  5. Pingback: Call, Write, Show Up! - The Minuteman

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