"After Aurora, Michael Tomasky on the Country the NRA Wants to See" - Daily Beast [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/21/after-aurora-michael-tomasky-on-the-country-the-nra-wants-to-see.html

Don’t believe those who say we will prevent horrific shootings. This is the America we live in now.

"If there’s one thing I hate hearing at times like this, it’s that violin-music language about how we must work to ensure that something like the Aurora shooting “never happens again.” I can understand why it makes people feel better in some way to say it. But really. Nonsense. We have no collective will in this country to make sure such a day never happens again. In fact, if anything, we are headed for a day when 20 percent of the people in a movie theater are armed themselves, and we have a good old shoot ’em up that would’ve made John Ford’s head spin but will make the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre’s heart soar like an eagle.


I’m not the stereotypical anti-gun liberal you probably think I am. Has something to do, I suppose, with growing up in West Virginia. I never hunted, but many of my friends did, and they weren’t nuts. They were . . . my friends. Further, I accept that guns have been a part of American life since the beginning—the first individual mandate after all, as liberals didn’t mind saying when seeking to defend the health-care law. I can understand (barely, but I can) how a person can love guns as I love guitars, which, if I had the money, I’d collect avidly.


But please. The idea that honest efforts to keep guns out of the hands of potential killers and mentally unstable people poses any rational threat to my friends or America’s hunters and collectors is completely preposterous. This is such a con. Rock-ribbed conservatives usually don’t show a great deal of sympathy for our country’s mentally ill, when the question involves social spending on their behalf; but by God try to deny them to right to bear arms, and watch how quickly and feverishly the right wing rallies to their side, linking arms as if the famous “slippery slope” would lead inevitably from the mentally ill to law-abiding citizens. (Technically, the mentally disturbed can’t buy guns, but as a practical matter, existing proscriptions are easily circumvented, as we learned with Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona)."


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