From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/dowd-from-apocalypse-to-dystopia.html
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 22, 2012
WASHINGTON
WE’RE a little overwrought now.
The N.R.A. understands that. It’s as patient with us as a husband with a tremulous pregnant wife prone to crying jags.
This is just a passing meltdown. We’ll get ourselves back under control soon and things will return to normal.
For decades, when the public has grown more sympathetic to gun control after an attempted assassination or a spike in gun murders or a harrowing school shooting, Wayne LaPierre and his fellow N.R.A. officials have hunkered down to wait for the “emotional period” or “hysteria,” as they call it, to pass.
They rule in the back rooms on Capitol Hill and rein in panicked senators and congressmen who fret that they should support some measly legislation to pretend they are not pawns of the gun lobby.
They defend anyone owning anything with a trigger, reiterating that military-style semiautomatics are just uglier hunting guns.
While there were more heartbreaking funerals in Newtown, Conn., with long hearses carrying small bodies, LaPierre stepped to the microphone in Washington on Friday to present the latest variation of his Orwellian creed: Guns don’t kill people. Media kill people.
“Rather than face their own moral failings,” he said in high dudgeon, “the media demonize gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws, and fill the national media with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action, and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.”
So it’s our fault.
LaPierre, who literally trembles when the omnipotent gun lobby is under siege, went ballistic painting a threatening picture of the dystopia that awaits if we don’t protect our schools from guns by putting guns in schools.
Continue reading at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/dowd-from-apocalypse-to-dystopia.html
