Of course, Raygun was inarticulately referring to black people, not white people.
Leonard Pitts Jr.: NRA retreats after rare attack of lucidity – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
A few days ago, the NRA inadvertently said something reasonable.
This, in response to a series of protests in Texas. It seems advocates of the right to openly carry firearms have taken to showing up en masse at public places — coffee shops, museums, restaurants etc. — toting shotguns and assault rifles. So say you’re snapping photos at Dealey Plaza, and up sidles some guy with an AK slung over his shoulder.
That sudden dryness of mouth and tightness of sphincter you feel is not reassurance.
“This is terrifying,” a visitor from Washington state told the Dallas Morning News. “We have guns in our house, but we don’t walk around with them. . . . This is shocking.”
The NRA seemed to agree. In an unsigned online editorial, it stated the obvious, calling the practice of bringing long guns into public places “dubious,” “scary” and “downright weird.”
Days later, having come, well . . . under fire, from Texas gun groups, the NRA was in retreat, apologizing and blaming this rare lapse of lucidity on a staff member who apparently failed to drink his full allotment of Kool-Aid. The organization assured its followers that it still supports the right of all people to bring all guns into all places. …
[W]hile the modern gun rights movement is usually regarded as a conservative construction, Winkler writes that it was actually born of liberal extremism. It seems that in 1967, a heavily armed group of Black Panthers showed up and walked brazenly into the California statehouse — there were no metal detectors — as a group of children were readying for a picnic with the new governor, Ronald Reagan.
The Panthers saw this as an exercise of their constitutional rights. Reagan and other conservative Republicans saw it as a threat and crafted laws to stop it from happening again. The future president said, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
The point being that what conservatives seem to regard as a mission of restoration isn’t. This idea that everyone in Chipotle’s should be armed is neither some holdover from the Old West nor some time-honored value inextricable from conservatism. No, it is wholly new. And wholly mad.
Leonard Pitts Jr.: NRA retreats after rare attack of lucidity – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com
