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The Onion Nailed the NRA’s Sandy Hook Statement Way Back in May
Anyone who expected “meaningful contributions” to the gun debate from the National Rifle Association following the Sandy Hook shootings that robbed us of 20 children and six brave adults probably doesn’t read The Onion.
Yup, they nailed it back in May:
As usual, this is pitch-perfect parody:
“Yeah, that’s probably the only way we’d reassess much of anything at this point: 1,000 dead kids, shot up pretty good, lying face down in the school auditorium or something like that,” LaPierre said, noting that anything less than 1,000 dead kids would not be enough for the NRA to stop urging Congress to pass pro-gun legislation. “I mean, that’s just a ballpark number, but I imagine seeing 1,000 or so body bags being wheeled out of a school and a whole town of crying parents would probably make us reflect on our values for at least a little bit.”
“So yeah, more or less 1,000 dead kids,” LaPierre added. “Something around there. And teachers don’t count.”
http://hypervocal.com/politics/2012/the-onion-nra/
For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
By JASON DePARLE
GALVESTON, Tex. — Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.
“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor.
Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O’Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to “get off the island” — escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston. Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death. They stuck together so much that a tutor called them the “triplets.”
Low-income strivers face uphill climbs, especially at Ball High School, where a third of the girls’ class failed to graduate on schedule. But by the time the triplets donned mortarboards in the class of 2008, their story seemed to validate the promise of education as the great equalizer.
...
Four years later, their story seems less like a tribute to upward mobility than a study of obstacles in an age of soaring economic inequality. Not one of them has a four-year degree. Only one is still studying full time, and two have crushing debts. Angelica, who left Emory owing more than $60,000, is a clerk in a Galveston furniture store.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html
Tom Toles Rant-Held Hostage
By Tom Toles
The gun debate has been quiet as a grave for years and years now. Why? Because the The More Guns the Better people had won the argument, completely. But, as it happens, temporarily. They cared more and they organized more and they finally achieved the Golden Pinnacle in interest group politics. An Absolute Hammerlock on all branches of government, including the Supreme Court. (Grover Norquist had achieved something close with Taxes). It eventually gets to the point where it doesn’t even matter what the arguments pro and con are in these situations. Ideology decides and power politics executes, so to speak. But I’ll summarize the argument for unrestricted gun ownership anyway.
The Founding Fathers wanted modified machine guns in every home. They didn’t know what a machine gun was, but they dreamed of them, which became known as The American Dream. Because they imagined this day coming, they wrote the Second Amendment to make sure it would come true. And because they wanted their wishes to be crystal clear, they worded the amendment as ambiguously as possible, putting in something about well-regulated militias as the context for the amendment, but they didn’t want you to consider that part seriously. They had some extra space on the paper and they needed to fill it up, like a kid faking an essay question on an exam.
And, now that we have defined the amendment the way we want them to have meant it, on to the guns! The more the better. The gun slaughter that decimated American cities for so many decades was a small price to pay, because, well it was in the cities and we lived in the suburbs, so if they are in there shooting each other, is that bad? Or good? Doesn’t matter. Outside the cities we knew how to take care of our massive arsenals. A semi-automatic military weapon in every bedroom? You never know when we might decide that we don’t like the laws passed by the world’s greatest democracy, and decide the government needs to be overthrown, and we need to “vote with our heat.” And so we sleep better knowing this is something we can get involved in at some point. What could go wrong?
What went wrong is too many wanton mass murders out where “real people” live. All of a sudden the abstract “debate” came heartbreakingly close to home. Innocent little kids. Some things you can’t wave away with rhetoric or lobbying money. And then democracy, as it’s supposed to, eventually comes to its senses.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-held-hostage-edition/2012/12/20/f5c1250e-4abe-11e2-9a42-d1ce6d0ed278_blog.html
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