15 May 2010 You just might be developmentally delayed

15 May 2010 You just might be developmentally delayed




I was offered a chance to attend the NRA annual convention in Charlotte VA; transport and admission included. I declined.

I am not a member of the NRA and don’t plan on becoming a member of the NRA. I do not like the organization’s use of fear-mongering and frank lies to raise money for lobbyists to use in support of the Republican Party. I don’t like the organization’s insistence that Americans need unfettered access to own fully automatic weapons. I don’t like the NRA’s continual push to retain gun show background check loopholes. I don’t like its assertion that prohibiting firearms sales to people on the terrorism watch list is threatening to 2nd Amendment protection.

I find it darkly amusing that Sarah Palin was a keynote speaker at this NRA convention. While literacy is not required to own and use a firearm, I would think that even the NRA would like to maintain an appearance of intellectual capability among its membership. Obviously I am mistaken. She delivered the expected, “Obama and Pelosis are coming for your guns any day now!” (One presumes without having to result to palmistry). The house swallowed this whole while seemingly forgetting that Obama has just signed off on a bill making it legal to carry firearms in national parks. After more disconnected, canned fear-mongering she descended to a new low.

Someone in her pack of handlers responding to the claim that the Tea Party mob is largely an assemblage of rural and southern red-necks steered her to imitate Jeff Foxworthy and to acknowledge that she has adopted the lowest common demographic. She, therefore, unleashed a set of “you might be a red-neck if…” jokes. But where Foxworthy’s jokes demonstrate an intellectual awareness, Palin’s use of them further demonstrates her lack of intellect and lack of willingness to actually try to advance intellectually. Instead of memorizing one or two jokes to include in her “speech” she read a bunch of them from her cell phone as if she were chanting another set of “talking points.” Personally, that sort of poor preparation and insulting performance would have me out of my seat and asking for my gate fee back. But the NRA audience apparently doesn’t mind being read to by someone who reads at about third grade level. After hearing the magic mantra, “Obama wants to take your guns away!” I guess they are willing to applaud anything that follows.

How terribly sad that the founders who had the intellect to write the 2nd Amendment are now supposedly linearly represented by men and women who lack the ability to read and understand the document they claim to want to defend. How disturbing that the NRA is likely to lobby for the continued right to circumvent existing gun registration laws and to demand that suspected terrorists still be allowed to purchase firearms. How troubling that someone who prides herself on not being intellectually curious should be lionized by NRA members because she has hunted moose from a helicopter. Her claims to be environmentally concerned are about as well founded as are the NRA’s that gun confiscation is eminent.

Gloria and I will actually be taking an NRA hand gun class, taught by our neighbor, Mike, next week. The NRA has a good hunter safety program that I took as a Boy Scout. They still offer it today and it is a great model for others to use in teaching hunter and firearms safety. The NRA used to be more about education than about fear-mongering. I get mail from them every month wanting money to use to warn others of the impending confiscation of our guns. When they stop that bull shit and return to teaching safety I might actually consider helping them. Until then, they’re just another bunch of lobbyists pumping fear and hatred into people who already contain too much of both.