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The NRA Has Declared War on America

'We are on our own,' Wayne LaPierre said on Saturday, then doubled down on his familiar prescription: 'the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!' (Photograph: AJ Mast / AP)

The NRA Has Declared War on America

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

As the annual meeting of National Rifle Association members started here this weekend, the gentleman seated next to me said to settle in: "It's mostly administrative stuff. We vote on things." He paused for emphasis: "It's the law."

He's somewhat mistaken, of course. The NRA doesn't have any state-mandated obligation to hold an annual meeting. What's more, the NRA has very little respect for the law. A half an hour later, at that very meeting, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

LaPierre's bleak vision is exaggerated dystopianism in service of sedition, a wide-ranging survey of targets that put justice against the intrusions of the IRS on a continuum with (as an advertisement he ran during his speech put it) workplace "bullies and liars".

Read the rest of this article at the Guardian...

© 2023 The Guardian