The NRA's Newtown massacre 'no comment' and the evil that men do
10:31 pm - 12/17/2012
Forget what you know about mental illness.
Forget what you know about America's singular belief that guns are the one and only solution to so many of our problems — from how we combat crime to how we conduct our foreign policy.
Forget how guns are as essential to the stories that you watch on the small or big screen as dialogue, plot, and characters to cheer or jeer.
Because Erick Erickson knows what, or who, is to blame for yesterday's tragic mass murder in Newtown: Satan.
Now, Erickson, editor of the conservative website RedState, never specifically mentions the devil by name, but make no mistake, that is who the RedStater believes is behind the bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Erickson writes:
Erickson, of course, is wrong. This has nothing to do with God or Satan. It has everything to do with an even more powerful force: the NRA.
I ask you to think for moment and imagine the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary. I want you to think of the weapons involved. The man who murdered the 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook didn't simply point his gun, pull the trigger, and somehow magically they fell down dead like a nameless Stormtrooper.
The gun is a powerful and devastating weapon. It is not a magic wand. It's wounds are not those of a scalpel, clean and precise. It's destructive powers are clumsy and careless and cruel. And it's this ability to take another's life in the simplest manner possible that NRA believes is our most precious right. It is the one that must be protected over all others, including our right to worship who and what we want to.
The folks at the NRA don't want to live in a world of peace. They want to live in a world in which madmen walk into schools and malls and movie theaters and begin to randomly kill, maim, and terrify innocent men, women, and children. There is a heartlessness in them that is every bit as strong as the evil men who commit these senseless crimes. After all, when the NRA was asked for a comment on yesterday's tragedy, they did not express sorrow. They did not offer condolences to the families whose lives had been horribly changed. Instead, the NRA said they had no comment.
The truth of the matter is that many in the NRA long for the day when they'll finally get the chance to gun down a home invader or a mugger or someone like the savage soul who murdered the children of Sandy Hook Elementary.
But what they want most of all is to use their guns for the reasons they were made: to kill another human being. And not only do they believe that there is value in having the ability to end another person's life, they believe that doing so will be an affirmation of their beliefs. It will be their redemption.
And that, my friends, is true evil.
source
Forget what you know about America's singular belief that guns are the one and only solution to so many of our problems — from how we combat crime to how we conduct our foreign policy.
Forget how guns are as essential to the stories that you watch on the small or big screen as dialogue, plot, and characters to cheer or jeer.
Because Erick Erickson knows what, or who, is to blame for yesterday's tragic mass murder in Newtown: Satan.
Now, Erickson, editor of the conservative website RedState, never specifically mentions the devil by name, but make no mistake, that is who the RedStater believes is behind the bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Erickson writes:
Our nation once shared a God who we all prayed to. Increasingly, the loudest voices in the nation are hostile to that God and those who worship him. The conversation at times of evil is immediately drown out by political opportunists seeking to drive their agenda. The news channels meditate on the nature of gun violence and gun restrictions or what other restrictions or laws can ever be used.
We do that, in part, because in times of helplessness it makes us feel like we can do something.
But we can do nothing in the face of evil until we confront evil itself.
The tragedy unfolding today is not an act of the insane, but an act of evil. That evil may drive the shooter insane, but in focusing on the insanity we lose focus on the evil.
There is really real good and there is really real evil in the world. Each time I have written that here on this site a vocal group of secularists and atheists have loudly chimed in to ridicule me for doing so.
They’ll do so again. But in this small window America has a real moment to assess why it is that it is careening out of control morally and socially. In that small window, instead of discussing the politics or the laws, we should discuss the evil and the good and the God from whom we have, as a nation. drifted so far.
Erickson, of course, is wrong. This has nothing to do with God or Satan. It has everything to do with an even more powerful force: the NRA.
I ask you to think for moment and imagine the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary. I want you to think of the weapons involved. The man who murdered the 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook didn't simply point his gun, pull the trigger, and somehow magically they fell down dead like a nameless Stormtrooper.
The gun is a powerful and devastating weapon. It is not a magic wand. It's wounds are not those of a scalpel, clean and precise. It's destructive powers are clumsy and careless and cruel. And it's this ability to take another's life in the simplest manner possible that NRA believes is our most precious right. It is the one that must be protected over all others, including our right to worship who and what we want to.
The folks at the NRA don't want to live in a world of peace. They want to live in a world in which madmen walk into schools and malls and movie theaters and begin to randomly kill, maim, and terrify innocent men, women, and children. There is a heartlessness in them that is every bit as strong as the evil men who commit these senseless crimes. After all, when the NRA was asked for a comment on yesterday's tragedy, they did not express sorrow. They did not offer condolences to the families whose lives had been horribly changed. Instead, the NRA said they had no comment.
The truth of the matter is that many in the NRA long for the day when they'll finally get the chance to gun down a home invader or a mugger or someone like the savage soul who murdered the children of Sandy Hook Elementary.
But what they want most of all is to use their guns for the reasons they were made: to kill another human being. And not only do they believe that there is value in having the ability to end another person's life, they believe that doing so will be an affirmation of their beliefs. It will be their redemption.
And that, my friends, is true evil.
source
Too fucking ashamed of themselves probably.
Also, Erick Erickson? *snicker*
"Seriously though. Do you want teachers carrying concealed weapons at all times? Do you want a high schooler to know that if he overpowers a woman my size he can have access to a gun? Or a kindergartner to set one off while giving her a hug? Or do you want them to be locked away in a safe and kept in the school overnight, so poorly secured schools become arsenals? Do you want to pay higher taxes for the 6 million teachers in America to be given guns and training to properly use them? Have any of you really thought this through?"
I doubt any of them will take the bait. It's such ignorant bullshit and I am so sick of it.
i posted this rebuttal to the photo going around FB of the tshirt with the "message" from God telling "Concerned Student" that He is not allowed in schools.
i thought about that this morning...and realized this actually is not true.
so organized prayers over the PA system aren't held anymore. so what? that doesn't remove Him entirely. students who are Christian are still allowed to do the following:
-- wear clothes/jewelry with religious symbols on them
-- have school-sanctioned religion clubs after school on school grounds
-- participate in See You At The Pole events annually
-- carry their religious books on campus and read them on campus
-- pray by themselves/in small groups of friends
oh, and don't forget that the Pledge is still led at the beginning of the school day in practically all schools/preceding sporting events at high schools.
i regularly wore my cross necklaces and sometimes wore Christian tshirts. i had one of those mini New Testaments in my purse. and i participated in group prayers with other students before drama company performances/choir concerts.
i never joined the clubs or went to the Pole events (thanks to bullies who claimed to be Christians showing up there also.) but no teacher ever forced me to remove my necklace or confiscated my mini New Testament. our drama teacher and choir director never said boo about group prayers. and the club/Pole events were fully sanctioned by the administration.
so until all of the above is also banned, then that statement (or any other insinuation that God "has been taken out of schools") is blatantly false.
bottom line, organized prayers in school would not have stopped a mentally ill gunman. i don't get why anyone would think it would.
(and yes, if anyone wants to repost/quote me, go for it.)
I'm afraid of religious people who truly believe these things. They think the country will be safer with a state religion and guns in the hands of good Christian bigoted white men who would turn this country into the fucking Handmaid's Tale. So I'm actually more frightened of this than of the Phelps family and their 'church' because so many people in the US listen to this rhetoric.
Or is that the point? Do they want to believe that nothing can be done, so they can hold onto their precious little semiautomatics?
Insanity.
My husband is a preschool teacher and he said he just looks at those kids and imagines someone coming in with a gun...we're both terrified. He wants to move to Canada. I just want to get off this planet.
two.
...yeah, gonna sit fucking pretty, stay here, and raise my kids in a country where, while my kids may have to worry about bullying, they won't have to worry about being shot eleven times, tyvm
because apparently he cannot enter schools as if hes blocked my a firewall or something
i mean not even the pledge of allegiance is helping reach his hand in
hes so powerless during a school shooting because we simply said "NO GOD IN SCHOOLS"
so we have to keep on chanting this in every aspect of life and POOF! he will be gone
...huh, who know christians had such little faith in their god!
There is no separation between church and state in the US.
I don't see that as a very good solution either.