The National Rifle Association recently ran an ad calling President Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for having armed protection for his children at school. BuzzFeed and some other outlets reported the NRA meant Secret Service, but an extended version of the ad made clear that the NRA was talking about the school’s staff security team…. “[The] school Obama’s daughters attend has 11 armed guards,” the longer ad’s narrator says, citing an article from Breitbart.com. But a fact-check by the Washington Post found that not to be the case. The Post called the school, Sidwell Friends, where Obama’s daughters attend and asked if the school had armed guards. The school responded that none of their 11 security members carry any firearms.
There’s an old saying, normally associated with tabloid journalism, which goes “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” In the case of the NRA, it’s “Never let the truth get in the way of some primo propaganda.” The paranoid conspiracy theorists who run the NRA have a generally adversarial relationship with the truth. Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre has stated that it’s “crystal clear” that President Obama’s second term agenda including confiscating guns from good, God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic Americans. That nothing could be further from the truth matters not at all to LaPierre or his associates, who spare no effort when it comes to lies, propaganda, dissembling, and character assassination in the service of their cause.
That none of Sidwell Friends’ security guards carry firearms isn’t nearly as important to the NRA leadership as CONVINCING their membership and other similarly inclined Americans that they do. By doing so, they (at least in their fevered, paranoid imagination) get to paint the President as a hypocrite whose ultimate goal is to take our guns. You can do this when you care more for guns and the gun industry than you do human life or the truth.
Here’s what I don’t understand: Why are the millions of decent, reasonable gun ownere, whom I suspect compose the vast majority of NRA members, not calling out the group’s leadership for their paranoid fear-mongering? Why do they sit by mutely while their leadership paints all NRA members as paranoid wackjobs by association? Could it be that at some level they agree that President Obama wants to take their guns??
