Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
One might expect the NRA to issue statements fairly quickly after a massacre like the one that occurred in Las Vegas late Sunday night. One would be wrong. The NRA always goes dark. They went dark after 22 little children were shot up inside Sandy Hook Elementary School, and they’ve been dark ever since Las Vegas. The obvious reason is that they’re working on a message that they no doubt think will come across as meaningful, but in reality is a wholly inappropriate and sorry attempt to push their “moar gunz” agenda.
Their spin masters are no doubt hard at work on this right now. After all according to Politico, the NRA spent decades perfecting their approach to responding to tragedies like this. They go all in for “aggressive fact-finding,” and have long strategy-development sessions before they issue any public statements. However, a former NRA lobbyist gave Politico the appalling details they’re working on. This is almost rage-inducing:
“They’re trying to figure out what happened. [The top priority would be] to learn what we can about the shooter.
Already, one hears the call for every kind of ban in the world for guns before they know what happened. What matters isn’t the particular type of gun but the person holding it…and how did they obtain this gun?”
Holy. Hell. We know what happened. We know Stephen Paddock got his guns perfectly legally, along with the ammo and the kits he used to turn his semi-automatic weapons into something far closer to fully automatic weapons. We know he had 47 rifles, that he bought 33 of them in the last 12 months, and that 12 of them were outfitted with those modifications. We know he sprayed bullets into a crowd from the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
And we know that he wouldn’t have been able to hurt or kill so many people if it weren’t for the types of guns he had. It’s really hard to mow down 500 people and murder over 58 from the 32nd floor of a hotel with a bolt-action rifle, since you can’t modify those to become automatic weapons.
What about past mass shootings? Omar Mateen bought the guns he used in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando perfectly legally. The two who shot up an office party in San Bernardino in 2015 got their two handguns legally at a store in Corona, CA. Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, had 14 guns, all of which were purchased legally through a federally licensed arms dealer.
Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in a historic black church in South Carolina, should have been prohibited from buying a gun, but the person who did his background check never obtained the police report from his arrest over drug possession, so he was able to buy a gun.
Army Specialist Ivan Antonio Lopez, who opened fire at Ft. Hood with a semi-automatic pistol in 2014, bought his gun legally from the same shop where another Army soldier bought at least one of the guns he used to murder 13 people at Ft. Hood just five years earlier.
Need we go on? The NRA is silent under the guise of “finding the facts,” including how the shooters get their guns, which is ridiculous since it’s so easy for anyone to get a gun. This is just a pathetic excuse to buy time to “politely” exploit the tragedy for their own “moar gunz” agenda.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what happened, or how it happened. Law-abiding gun owners are law-abiding right up until they aren’t. That is a fact. The problem is that it’s just too damned easy to get guns - even military-style guns - and if we don’t address that, then we can’t stop any future mass shootings.
Featured image via Scott Olson/Getty Images
