Delusions of (Armed) Grandeur

A couple weeks ago—on this very internet!—I opined that James Dobson, founder of old-timey-values group Focus On The Family, was using the tragedy in Newtown, CT,  to further his old-timey agenda. A few days after Dobson's remarks, and a full week after Adam Lanza's murderous rampage, the National Rifle Association finally emerged from its bunker of silence to fire off a barrage of wild comments of its own in response to the massacre. I was interested to learn that the NRA actually agreed with my assessment of Dobson's crass behavior—here's the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, explaining that it's disrespectful to respond to a tragedy with self-promotion. (By the way, if you've ever wondered what it would be like to listen to Droopy Dog reciting the phonebook, a minute of this will give you a pretty good idea.)

 

"Out of respect for the families and until the facts are known, the NRA has refrained from comment. While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectably silent. Now, we must speak for the safety of our nation’s children."

He makes an important distinction: it's okay to use a tragedy to promote your screwy worldview, but only after a seven day waiting period.

By the way, after sitting through just a couple minutes of that half-hour speech I was already starting to feel the calcification of my blood in my veins, so I switched over to this transcript, which I was able to get through faster than you could field-strip a handgun. Anyway, Mr. LaPierre finally gets around to a discussion of gun control—or more accurately, he side-steps gun control and instead detours into the realm of fantasy:

"Now, I can imagine the headlines, the shocking headlines you’ll print tomorrow. “More guns,” you’ll claim, “are the NRA’s answer to everything.” Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools."

Many people are indeed calling for a ban on the kinds of assault weapons used in mass killings of innocent civilians, but in the paranoid world of the NRA, a restriction on any gun is the same as ATF agents storming your compound with tanks and prying every last gun from your hands (which are presumably cold and dead, of course). Mr. LaPierre is incapable of recognizing differences between bans of different types of guns, though he has no trouble with the nuances of the guns themselves.

The media calls semi-automatic fire arms, machine guns. They claim these civilian semi-automatic fire arms are used by the military. They tell us that the .223 is one of the most powerful rifle calibers, when all of these claims are factually untrue, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

What idiots the media are! Things are much safer than the news would have you believe, because the weapons that are killing our children are not, in fact, of military caliber! So everything's okay, right? Well, no: LaPierre explains that our society is incredibly dangerous—on account of all the psychopaths running around with assault weapons that can be purchased with ease at Walmart—and declares that we must immediately deploy armed guards everywhere to defend against this uncontrolled menace.

The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them. They walk among us every single day, and does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment? . . . The only way—the only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

I suppose this makes some sense—if your worldview is dominated by a love of firepower, then naturally your problem solving strategies will tend towards weaponization. LaPierre is like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, who fantasizes about the day when a bunch of masked bandits will come climbing over the fence so he can shoot them all with his Red Rider BB Gun.



Only LaPierre is not ten years old.

Still, there may be something to that kind of reasoning. For instance, instead of instituting leash laws that strip dogs of their freedom, municipalities could just encourage citizens to carry machetes to defend against all the vicious roaming dogs. Everybody wins!

Focus on the Families, Not the Old Testament

In the wake of the awful events of Friday, December 14, in Newtown, Connecticut, it's hard to feel anything but shock, anger and profound sadness. Nonetheless, no tragedy is so horrific that at least one high-profile Bible-thumper will feel no shame in using the atrocity as an excuse to promote his old-timey agenda. Three days after the incomprehensible killings, Focus On The Family founder James Dobson shared some choice comments with the world:

“I think we have turned our back on the scripture and on God almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on.”

When we are confronted with something as horrifying, heartbreaking and senseless as the cold-blooded murder of 26 people in an elementary school, we want to understand, to find some meaning. While there's been a lot of talk about how it might have been prevented, I still can't begin to fathom why it happened.

But James Dobson has a pretty good hunch.

“I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn't exist, or he's irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.”

I'm no theologian, but I think Dobson is implying that, in addition to feeling ignored, God was angry about the termination of unborn children...so consequently He killed 20 children. Can that be right? Again, I don't watch enough Religion and Ethics Newsweekly to have any claim of expertise in this area, but I think it's fair to say that unless you have a raging hard-on for the vengeful early books of the Bible, such an explanation is completely loony.

Generally I try not to level the term "moron" at anybody other than myself, but when you ignore all the facts and instead attribute horrific monstrosities exclusively to things on your pre-existing list of grievances, it does technically classify you as a moron. The world is having a large-scale discussion about mental health issues and gun laws, and the moron James Dobson stands up and says, “Duh, it’s because of abortion. And the Gays. Duh!!”

I "get" God better than you do.

Now, about that abortion explanation. Abortions are legally performed in Australia, too, and yet there have been no mass shooting rampages Down Under since last century. Though I suppose I shouldn’t jump to conclusions—maybe God really wants to confer judgment on the Ozzies too, but his almighty hands are tied on account of the rapid-fire gun restrictions that were enacted there a while back, which Nicholas Kristof recently detailed:

In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. 

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.

Given the effectiveness of that legislation, we'd better not enact anything similar here in the U.S. If God is no longer allowed to send a psychotic angel of death to murder our 1st graders with an assault rifle, how will we know when He's unhappy with the bearing of our national moral compass?

Dobson is at least half-right about one thing, though: “The institution of marriage is on the verge of complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences, too.”

It sure will! Much like the redefinition of the right to vote had consequences, namely that voting is no longer the exclusive right of white male property owners. (Dobson strikes me as the kind of guy who would’ve opposed those changes, too.)

(This, too, is a picture of that guy.)

Of course, it’s not surprising that someone as rationally-challenged as Dobson would fail to realize that the goal of the Marriage Equality movement is not so much a “complete redefinition" of marriage as it is an “addendum” to marriage, to the effect of, “Also gays can too.”

I know it's because I'm an imbecile myself and thus I often have a hard time accepting reality, but I still find it shocking and utterly dismaying that people like The Moron James Dobson remain in such prominent and apparently influential positions in this country. Now, like TMJD, I'm not very good at suppressing my opinions, but even I can recognize that, no matter how strongly you feel, there are times in life when you just need to shut the fuck up. For future reference, Mr. Dobson, when parents of murdered school children are desperately trying to understand what has just happened to them—and your immediate urge is to proclaim that God is angry because people aren't religious enough anymore—that is one of those times.