In case you can't read it, up there is a waving American flag with the words "We grieve and pray for those who lost their lives and for those hurt at the Washington Navy Yard." It's a grab from the homepage of the National Rifle Association's website. At this point in our ludicrous gun debate and our ongoing mass shootings crisis, it's a little like if the military said that they were sad about all the dead kids in Hiroshima and then still went ahead and nuked Nagasaki. Hey, NRA twats, your fuckin' expression of sympathy is bullshit if it's not backed up with any action.
Oh, sure, we're gonna hear the same tune over and over: "Washington, DC, has strict gun laws, but see what happened? Ergo, your laws don't work" is the most easily destroyed example. Ask anyone who says that if they want every single road into DC blocked so that all cars and pedestrians could be checked for guns from Virginia or, hell, most other places in the nation. All it proves is that we need national laws, not the patchwork of contradictions that we have now.
There's no need to recapitulate all the ways in which the NRA's monomaniacal focus on liberating guns from all that pesky oversight has helped to make this nation into a violent joke. We know them, of course, since the Newtown massacre happened such a short time ago. And we also know that Congress is comprised primarily of cowards, whores, whorish cowards, and cowardly whores, and they are not going to cross the NRA for fear of whatever pimpish reprisals the organization might bring about, even if it's on things that 90% of Americans want, like universal background checks.
Instead, let's put aside gun control for a moment. Let's for just a moment take the NRA at its word, post-Newtown, that it really believes that the nation needs to do more to help the mentally ill, as surely Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was.
The NRA leadership and the organization itself took a strong stand on addressing mental health issues, saying, "The NRA will support any reasonable step to fix America’s broken mental health system without intruding on the constitutional rights of Americans." You can bet we'll hear the same sort of shit now. Of course, it depends how you interpret such an "intrusion." The NRA seems to like this Supreme Court, which has loosened gun laws, and it's also upheld the Affordable Care Act as constitutional.
So here's the batshit crazy idea: Ask the NRA if it's willing to go all in on supporting Obamacare. After all, the ACA expands mental health coverage, especially when it comes to treatment. Hell, if the mentally ill get treated, they can perhaps become qualified to be gun owners and not just NRA members.
Put the fuck up or shut the fuck up. If the NRA believes, as it said back in 1966, that "the time is at hand to seek means by which society can identify, treat and temporarily isolate such individuals," then the NRA should support the most likely way this can be accomplished. Hell, the NRA should have been lobbying states to accept funds to expand Medicaid so that goal is achieved.
And the added bonus is that more people will have insurance when they shoot themselves or get shot by others. Win-win, you know.
