The NRA, Gun Control, and the Critical Mom

"They were idiots to forbid guns in schools," said the NRA spokesman on local TV, "If the teachers had had guns, they could have shot that guy."  

The hard boiled foolishness of the NRA man --the fruit of moneyed, Viagra-stuffed impotence--is crazier than Adam Lanza.  America remains the only democratic nation in the West to allow mentally ill persons easy access to lethal weapons. What will it take until they start beating their rifles into plowshares and their bayonets into pruning hooks?  Five thousand hours of psychotherapy?  But people only go that way when their symptoms disturb them.  And for the NRA, the symptoms feel anything but disturbing.  They seem instead thrilling.   The NRA never got seduced into making love, not war.  Beware Venus--she'll disarm you every time, and during that post-orgasmic slump, Mars finds his javelin disconcertingly limp.  The NRA takes the position that spears must always remain at attention, unsatisfied but pointed, no matter how frustrating the result.  As long as you can point and repeat-fire that Glock, you'll hardly notice how much you are missing.  It's cold comfort that those who live by the gun die by it.  But here are the stats:  The U.K., Sweden, and Germany endure LESS THAN FIFTY gun homicides every year.  In the "land of the free, the home of the brave," TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE lose their lives to bullets every year.  In Germany, you've got to have a permit to buy a gun, and trust to German bureaucracies to make getting a permit for anything--from marriage to unusual names for your child to buying a gun--a matter of serious endurance, not for the faint of heart.  Sometimes the Critical Mom is particularly grateful to live in an over-regulated, rule-ridden country.  Gun Control extends to kindergartens here, where for a considerable time after the end of the Second World War, children were allowed no toy guns of any kind in school or elsewhere.  So they took the paper bags in which they'd brought their school snacks and fashioned them into toy pistols.  And then some Old Country wisdom kicked in, and the teachers realized that allowing them to play with the paper bag pistols would render the kids far less likely to play with real Glocks when they grew up.