NRA still aiming at illusory ‘monsters’
BY FRANCIS WILKINSON
Jul 29 2015 12:01 am
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who presides over a state with a high rate of gun violence and a low quality of gun laws, is shocked. We never wouldve imagined it wouldve happened in Louisiana or Lafayette, he said after last weeks movie theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Jindal responded with a kind of gunner jujitsu, calling for other states to emulate the sloppy standards of Louisiana, which has loose gun laws and has largely failed to supply mental-health records to the criminal background check system, although a law signed by Jindal now requires it. Louisiana has the nations second-highest rate of death by firearm.
How could this have happened? is perhaps the most dishonest question in all of gun land. American gun culture is impressively pervasive, remarkably influential and reliably deadly. Give the gun lobby its due: It gets results.
It also gives the angry, paranoid and armed a collective voice. John Russell Houser, the cantankerous 59-year-old who opened fire at a showing of Trainwreck in Lafayette, seems to have dabbled in Hitler love. But his online complaints also echo the decline-and-fall narrative of National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre. ................(more)
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