Get a load of Wayne LaPierre, Vice-President of the NRA ... |
How do you talk to a person like this? I mean, we need to be able to discuss our differences like adults and have conversations about real problems, in reality, without slipping into a world of a paranoid delusion. I just ... I don't know how we do that when the well-funded, powerful, earnest people on the other side of the argument are, quite literally, mentally deranged.
There's a cure for ignorance -- information. There's even a cure for stupid -- education. I don't know what the cure for malevolent, willful ignorance, combined with the means, motive, and opportunity to lie and misinform about important issues on the national stage is.
What really irritates me is there are reasonable people who make relatively reasonable arguments for gun ownership while acknowledging guns are dangerous and should be carefully and vigilantly regulated, yet who fail to see the problem with paying dues to the NRA to help support guys like LaPierre. They aren't lunatics or fanatics, they just have a different experience with firearms and it informs a different sensibility. Like religious moderates who don't really believe all the hocus-pocus and dogma, but grew up in a church and like the social ties and the message of love and compassion they cherry pick from the mass of drivel by not thinking about it too hard, gun moderates enable their fundamentalist brethren by tolerating their extremist positions and paying into a club that does a lot reprehensible things, but ignoring all that and focusing instead on the one or two things that sound OK to them.