Another physical manifestation of terror
The NRA seems to have recognized its weakness on universal background checks for buying guns, as their spokesmen made the rounds yesterday, trying to reinforce their campaign of fear-mongering against this popular gun control policy. Undeterred by the demonstrable falsity of their claims, NRA executive vice president
Wayne LaPierre and
Ronnie Barrett, an NRA board member and manufacturer of his namesake sniper rifle, preached messages of conspiracy theory and revisionist history, aiming to frighten any doubting conservatives, gun owners or NRA members back into line.
With three-quarters of NRA members supporting background checks, their leaders have some work to do, since they're evidently not going to follow the will of their own membership.
Let's begin to face the peril with Wayne on Fox & Fringe, er, that is, Varney & Company on the Fox Business channel. Stuart Varney obligingly pretended to play devil's advocate, offering a position in favor of background checks while doing nothing to counter LaPierre's arguments. I guess he personified the straw man.
LAPIERRE: It is a huge waste of money. It's going to be selectively enforced. It's going to be abused. And the worst thing, you're creating a registry of all the law-abiding people in the country that own firearms. I know the politicians say, "Hey, we'll never use that list to confiscate." That's a pretty darn tall order to believe a promise from people in this town right now.
Media Matters goes on to explain,
yet again, how the NRA chooses to ignore the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA), the law
they worked to pass, which forbids the creation of a federal gun registry. It's this law which has created the sticking point in Senate negotiations, as Republicans resist any kind of record-keeping -- and as Democrats try to find an effective alternative to a federal agency.
The Raw Story also notes Wayne's appearance on Fox Business, pointing out his empathic commentary on the mentally ill...
“It’s a speed bump for the law-abiding,” he said in an interview with Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney. “It has no effect in the real world on stopping crime or keeping mental defectives from committing horrible acts.”
LaPierre goes on to claim that HIPAA laws and privacy laws will prevent would-be mass shooters from being entered into the system for psychological issues. This NRA article of faith, as usual, is demolished by the facts. As can be seen in this
helpful infographic from the Center for American Progress, of the nearly 2 million people blocked from purchasing guns via NICS background checks, 1.1% are categorized as "severely mentally ill." They cite
FBI data on adjudicated mental health reasons for denial, and that percentage translates into 10,690 people who tried and were stopped from buying a gun.
Mind you, this is the current, flawed, incomplete record-keeping system that President Obama and Democrats in Congress are trying to reform and improve. This system that Wayne LaPierre claims isn't stopping anybody, in reality, has stopped almost 2 million people.
I find it interesting, if a bit odd, that the likes of Wayne LaPierre continues to rain down abuse and trash-talk on the mentally ill. It doesn't seem to be in keeping with the NRA business model. Then again, considering the NRA's desired result of no new gun laws, maintenance of the status quo, ever more gun proliferation, and of course profits for gun manufacturers...
All right then, don't tell me that it's too perilous. Let's have just a little bit more peril. In the form of Ronnie Barrett, CEO of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing and a member of the board of the NRA. Yes, when I see an NRA board member on an NRA sponsored TV show, I see just another NRA spokesman. Barrett's history of gun manufacturing and sales is...interesting, perhaps worth a moment to read that wiki article. This is another company who refuses to sell to law enforcement, specifically in California, as punishment for their state's law against the company's .50 caliber rifles.
In Ronnie's case, he appeared on the NRA's Cam & Company show on the Sportsman Channel. This NRA propaganda vehicle is often featured on Media Matters, and in my diaries for that matter. So here we go again, as Barrett compares gun laws to Nazi Germany and predicts genocide...
Ronnie Barrett, defender of liberty
BARRETT: In all of history when this kind of stuff has happened before, it's bad news. You know and I hate to be one of these doomsday guys, but in past things like this result in the death of millions. You know, and World War II hasn't been 700 years ago, it's only been 70 years ago. And if people don't think that these things don't happen to modern, progressive, Christian nations like Germany was, they're wrong, brother, I mean we're sitting here just nearly repeating the same past of that, the disarming of the citizenry not based on any facts but based on cynical emotions that are put in and rushed through in the middle of the night before anybody has a chance to study the true facts, before their citizenry even knows what's going on. I mean holy smokes, what kind of state government was that? I can't believe that's one of the members of the Union here, one of the members of our Republic. It's just unimaginable.
Compare this to the previous video of Wayne and Stuart tut-tutting about the confiscation of guns in the United Kingdom. How about that, anyway? A law was
passed there in 1997, which banned private gun ownership almost completely. Surprisingly, years later -- 10 years since the full effect of the law was achieved -- no genocide. Wondrous. Well, it could be Barrett is just mad with them because his company used to supply sniper rifles to the IRA; I suppose Barrett may not be selling many Light Fifties there now.
And in some previous work, I've gone over the revisionist history used by the NRA to falsely compare gun control legislation to the Nazis. Actual history shows that the gun laws in Germany were much more strict, prior to the Nazi regime, and that the 1938 law signed by Hitler deregulated guns for most Germans, while prohibiting gun ownership for Jews and some other persecuted classes. To quote again the historian Salon consulted on the matter:
“Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
Of course, Wayne wants his flock to believe the myth that
they are a persecuted class, even as he barks about gun laws unfairly treating a hundred million gun owners. A hundred million people, as a persecuted minority class? Wayne's absurdities don't stand up to scrutiny. What he's counting on, though, is a
lack of scrutiny. From gun owners, from the NRA membership, and a lack of scrutiny from the media won't hurt his chances either.
Which is why I value Media Matters' work, and make such frequent use of it. Let some light shine on these hectoring blackcoats and their false dogma. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the saying goes.
(Cross-posted at The Tytalan Way on Wordpress.)
12:59 PM PT: http://www.nraila.org/...
After more thoughtful commentary... :) I looked up data on gun ownership, as that 100 million figure quoted in The Raw Story seemed...awfully convenient. And it was, apparently. This 'fact card' from the NRA, from January, claims 70-80 million gun owners, 40-45 million that own handguns.
Not as if Fox Business is going to fact-check the windbag.