While I’m usually the last to use sports metaphors since I know so little about sports and care even less, I find it apt to assert that the new and dynamic youth-led gun safety movement, #NeverAgain, has pushed the National Rifle Association’s leadership onto the ropes.
After each of the numerous high-profile mass gun tragedies over the past few decade or so, the NRA has typically maintained a relatively low profile and has remained virtually silent for a specific amount of time until headlines fade from view and the country’s attention diverts elsewhere.
Since the horrific massacre of 17 gentle souls, however, at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida recently, the leadership of the NRA has spoken out by attacking everything and everyone from the so-called “legacy” and “fake” media, to community law enforcement and the “corrupt” FBI, to Hollywood, Washington, and even to the emerging student activists.
In fact, both Wayne LaPierre Jr., Executive VP of the National Rifle Association, as well as NRA spokesperson, Dana Loesch, co-opted one of #NeverAgain’s phrases, “We Call BS,” used so effectively by one of its courageous leaders, Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas High School. But to paraphrase an old truism, obvious and ineffectual attempts at cooptation are the highest forms of flattery!
Speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, Loesch indicted the media:
“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it. Now I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you.”
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(For those like myself who don’t know what she means by “legacy media,” I discovered a definition as “n. Primarily mature newspaper and television news outlets that believe they are the final word on any topic.”)
Next, when it was LaPierre’s turn to rant at CPAC, he brought out every tired clichéd buzzword in the ultra-conservatives’ perennially-referenced playbook to attack and demean individuals and institutions holding anything other than the NRA’s extremist positions on the Second Amendment.
He accused “intellectual elites,” who think they are “smarter and better,” and oppose “free-market capitalism” and “restrict freedoms,” in their “utopian dream” in pushing their “terrifying” and “freedom killing” style of “European-style Socialism.” Any first-year psychology student will perceive the mechanism of projection in his claim that “socialism is a movement that loves to smear.”
Subsumed within his overarching nationalist theme of a “socialist enemy,” which he claimed “oppose[s] our fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights,” he embedded an anti-intellectual subtext by going after higher education. Taking words that could have come directly from the mouth of Senator Joseph McCarthy, LaPierre warned that the Communist Manifesto and all the works of Karl Marx were among the most assigned curricular materials, and he described socialism as “a political disease,” to loud and boisterous cheers.
Warning the ballroom audience packed to overflowing:
“You should be anxious and you should be frightened. If these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate and, God forbid, they win the White House again, our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever, and the first to go will be the Second Amendment to the US constitution.”
LePierre tipped his hand that he not only fears the youth leading the fast-moving mobilization against gun violence, but also several strong voices in a new crop and old guard of political leaders that he singled out in his CPAC diatribe, some of whom are potential 2020 presidential candidates. These were Senators Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Murphy (D-CN), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Even before the Cold War and the so-called “McCarthy Era” (named after Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy), individuals and groups on the political and theocratic Right have flung the term “Socialist” as an expletive from their metaphoric sling shots into the faces of their political opponents to discredit their characters and dismiss their political ideas and policies, and to sway the electorate toward a conservative and nationalist agenda.
This continues to this very day as evidenced by opponents of Senator Bernie Sanders who has described himself as a “Democratic Socialist.” Enemies of the Affordable Care Act often warned that its passage would march us down the devastating path of “European-style Socialism,” oh my!
As destructive and as freedom-killing as the Right would have us believe, according to the World English Dictionary, Socialism involves “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” where each of us has a stake and advances in the success of our collective economy.
No country in the world today stands as a fully Socialist state, but rather, some of the most successful economies combine elements of Capitalism with Socialism to create greater degrees of equity and lesser disparities between the rich, the poor, and those on the continuum in between.
This year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development again conducted its annual “Better Life Index” to determine the “happiest countries in the world,” according to its residents. Based on an 11-measure survey assessing quality of life, including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance, and life satisfaction, all Scandinavian countries, plus Iceland, Netherlands, and Switzerland, and only one North American country, plus Australia, and New Zealand reached the top 10 ranked countries.
Included in descending order are number one, Norway, followed by Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada (which provides a single-payer health care system unlike its North American neighbor, the United States), New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia (which places severe restrictions on firearms ownership and, thereby, has significantly reduced gun violence).
The United States did not make the cut in the top 10 falling to 15th.
Therefore, we might do well to look to these countries for some of their “socialist” policies that sustain significantly higher levels of economic and social quality and vastly lower rates of gun-related and overall rates of violence and murders.
But to LaPierre and other nationalist and “neo-liberal” advocates of smaller government and massive deregulation of the private and corporate sectors, virtually any and every form of governmental regulation they label “socialistic.” And though their battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “individual personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on the surface, what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?
How free and liberated are the estimated 11,000 people gunned down annually in the United States? And how free and liberated are their loved ones left behind? How free and liberated today are the viciously murdered 20 beautiful babies and six of their teachers and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School? How free and liberated are the 14 murdered teens and their three teachers at Douglas High School?
How truly free and liberated are we as a nation when a powerful lobbying group buys our politicians to vote for the special interests of the industrial firearms complex over the best interests of we the people and to the detriment of our democratic form of government?
LaPierre concluded his CPAC speech by repeating his delusional mantra that he introduced following the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012:
“To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.”
No Wayne, to stop a bad guy with a gun, we as a society must determine and enact common sense regulations on the manufacture, sale, capacity, force, type, and number of firearms we are willing to allow so we may better ensure safer and more socially connected communities.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images