The National Rifle Association: Dishonest, disingenuous...and built to stay that way

After a mass shooting, the NRA traditionally goes silent for a period of time. In the case of the gun massacre in Oregon, the NRA stopped tweeting on Thursday, October 1 at 1:44 p.m., shortly after the news broke. The account resumed tweeting at 12:07 p.m. on Friday, October 2 with an innocuous tweet about gun safety. By Monday, the NRA twitter account was aggressively tweeting out information intended to head off any efforts to increase gun control in the wake of the massacre at Umpqua Community College. Much of this information, however, was wildly misleading or just plain inaccurate.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) tends to follow a predictable pattern in the aftermath of a mass shooting. Their social media accounts go quiet, but with a couple days they’re back at it, usually arguing that “it’s too soon” to discuss gun control. Then they’ll hold forth about how the victims themselves are responsible (DUH- they didn’t have guns with which to defend themselves), or that the massacre took place in a gun-free zone (no good guy with a gun was available to stop a bad guy with a gun).

It’s difficult to overstate the dishonesty, disinformation, and propaganda that the NRA traffics in. Though those of us who favor common sense gun control would be willing to have a rational discussion with Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, given the lack of integrity the NRA operates with a meeting of the minds appears to be increasingly impossible. This works well for the NRA and the Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © they represent, because the status quo means nothing changes. Innocent people will continue to die in senseless slaughters that may well be preventable but for the selfishness and intransigence of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©.

To provide an idea of just how dishonest and thoroughly disingenuous the NRA can be, the following five tweets should be sufficient to demonstrate just how invested in prevarication and propaganda Wayne LaPierre and his merry band of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © are.

If you discount the thousands upon thousands of guns of private sales by unlicensed dealers at gun shows, well no, there isn’t any “gun show loophole.” The clear and obvious NRA dishonesty aside, there absolutely IS a “gun show loophole.”. If you’re employing NRA logic, denying something exists means it in fact doesn’t exist and therefore you never have to do anything about it.

Honestly, the only “joke” is the NRA’s commitment to dishonesty and their willingness to pull statistics out of their backside in order to “support” their “arguments.”