NRA: You soulless fucks are the LAST people who should criticize parents of kids murdered by your killing machines. https://t.co/Kf3BnfCwEw
— Barracks O'Bama (@P0TUS) September 1, 2015
Colion Noir, a commentator and web series host for the National Rifle Association (NRA), warned the parents of slain journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward against becoming “so emotional” in response to the fatal shooting of their children that they channel their “grief-inspired advocacy” to the wrong effect. The NRA and other opponents of stronger gun laws consistently argue that calls for new gun laws in the wake of a shooting tragedy are based on emotion rather than logic. Just hours after his daughter was killed, Andy Parker announced on national television that he would make it his “mission in life” to get stronger gun laws passed. Parker’s mother, Barbara Parker, said during an interview on CNN, “We cannot be intimidated, we cannot be pushed aside, we cannot be told that this fight has been fought before and that we’re just one more grieving family trying to do something.”…. Noir, who is the face of an NRA effort to influence a younger demographic, said in his video post that while he has “no right to tell any parent how to grieve for the loss of their child,” “sometimes in a fight we can become so emotional everyone and thing starts looking like the enemy, even if they’re there to help us”
One of the saddest aspects of the mass shootings which have become the background noise of life in America is the gun lobby’s cynical efforts to maintain the status quo. After a shooting, when attention is focused most intensely on the problem of gun violence, Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © are quick to remind us that it’s “too soon” to discuss reform when emotions are raw and anger out in the open. Better to wait until emotions subside and the matter can be discussed logically and dispassionately (or not at all), they say. Of course, they know full well how collective memory works. If nothing is done in the immediate aftermath, America moves on and gun violence as an issue fades into the background. Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © count on this, because they know that it will be easier to maintain the status quo if they don’t have to fight those angered by a shooting. Time is their ally; the longer things drag out after a shooting, the less likely the momentum for changing gun laws will be sustainable. Remember how the cry after the Sandy Hook massacre was “never again” and there was an almost palpable hope of what positive action the “Sandy Hook effect” might create? Right; remember all the ground-breaking gun reform laws passed in the aftermath of the senseless murder of 20 children and six adults?
Exactly.
All too often, Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © cynically accuse those advocating for common sense gun control of using the emotional aftermath of a mass shooting to push an “anti-gun, pro-government agenda”. They are, argue pro-gun control advocates, merely cynical attempts to manipulate those who may be emotionally vulnerable in the wake of a tragedy. Best to wait until a more appropriate and less emotional time…which never seems to arrive. Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © claim that pro-gun control advocates
use grieving victims to invoke an emotional response and spread misinformation falsely claiming that enacting their agenda would have prevented these tragedies and will prevent future tragedies.
In other words, Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © accuse “grieving victims” of the mirror image of what they do themselves. If this isn’t the most cynical, craven, and inhuman argument imaginable in the wake of a tragedy that is a mass shooting, I don’t know what would be. Not surprising, I suppose, and probably about what one could expect from those who value guns far more than human life.
Clearly, Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © don’t really give a damn about anyone burying their loved ones in the wake of a mass shooting. Perhaps it’s just that they view that carnage as the price of freedom. Perhaps they don’t see a reason for concern, because the loved ones of others are easy to regard as abstract concepts. Or perhaps they simply don’t give a damn about anything other than their unholy devotion to what they view as their “gun rights.”
I try to see the humanity in my ideological adversaries when possible; I don’t like to think I’m dehumanizing people no matter how much I may disagree with them. In the case of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, though, it’s often difficult to find that humanity, because too many of them don’t seem to care that their blind devotion to guns is directly responsible for the senseless deaths of innocent Americans. As much as I hate to assume the worst of anyone, Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © often offer little evidence of anything even faintly redolent of humanity.
And so we’ll continue to bury our loved ones, even as Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © continue to insist that it’s “too soon” to discuss common sense gun control. Go ahead try to find the humanity in that; I’m not certain I can.
