The NRA Idiocy of a Good Guy with a Gun

The NRA Idiocy of a Good Guy with a Gun

The least surprising thing in America happened again on Sunday: a mass shooting. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and gun violence. Ain’t that America?

Of course it is. Mass shootings don’t happen with such regularity in any other country on Earth. We kill big groups of innocent people with guns better than anyone. It’s part of our freedom.

This time the shooter opened fire in a mall in Greenwood, Indiana. The police say that a civilian with a handgun heard the shooting, fired at the gunman, and killed him. But not before three people were killed.

That sound you hear in the distance is the cheering of NRA gun fetishists. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” They’ll try to convince us that gun restrictions are a bad idea because they only prevent good people from getting guns, and if that good guy couldn’t get a gun, then the body count would have been higher.

Which of two fantasy worlds – one where everyone had a gun or one where no one had a gun – would be safer? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? We’ll never get rid of every gun, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work toward doing so. The toothpaste is out of the tube on America’s gun problem to an extent. Thanks to the monsters at the NRA, and the finest senators that their money can buy, we’ve created a country where guns have more rights than women.

Women’s bodies: Regulated. Guns: Not regulated.

But just because the toothpaste is out of the tube doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t clean it off the counter.

To clean up America’s gun problem we need to stop listening to the NRA and their supporters. They’ve lost all credibility. Letting these firearm-worshipping extremists hold us hostage has led us to their current “wisdom”: we’ve all got to arm ourselves because we’re the only ones who can stop a bad guy with a gun.

But more of their “wisdom” – the “right” for everyone to carry their guns openly in public, and the “constitutional right” to carry a gun without a license – means that the only way we can differentiate between a madman with a gun and a “law-abiding citizen” simply deciding to exercise their “rights” and carry a gun while shopping at JCPenney’s is to wait for the armed lunatic to start shooting. And that’s when the “good guy with a gun” steps in.

Put another way, rather than create a society where anyone with a gun in a public place can rightly be assumed to be a madman, the gun fetishists have created a society where we can’t tell if someone’s a madman until they’ve already shot someone. Translation: protecting the “right” of some “good guy” to pretend he can be some superhero vigilante is more important than protecting the actual life of a human being.

The irony of such an incident occurring on the same day that a report on the Uvalde school shooting is released can’t be overlooked. A bunch of “heroes” who are supposedly “brave” and “well-trained” stood by and did nothing rather than confront a madman killing children. A police officer at the school shooting in Parkland, Florida hid outside rather than confronting the gunman inside.

Good guys with guns.

Like most of what the NRA and their supporters have said since fringe radicals took over the organization in 1977, the Good Guy with a Gun argument is bullshit. Expecting some mythical good guy to stop a shooting after a lunatic has already shot someone, rather than trying to prevent the shooting from happening in the first place only makes obvious the toxic reality of the NRA and the guns rights lobby: they value guns more than humans.

America has a gun problem, and if we’re going to do anything about it we have to stop listening to those who created the problem: the NRA and gun rights advocates. We’re not in a position today to repeal the Second Amendment, but if we ever want to actually become a great country, we must do it someday.

IF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU’LL ALSO LIKE: My Other Posts about Gun Violence

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Brett Baker

I’ve been doing this blogging thing on ChicagoNow for more than two years now. I’m writing some fiction, also. I’ve got four kids, and something to say about almost everything. Blog topics past and future: parenting, politics, cereal, guns, time, toilet seats, films, math, music, and the ridiculous Steven Seagal. If it exists–or if it should exist–I’ll write about it. I hope you’ll read it.

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