Targeted by the NRA
Just got my invitation to join the National Rifle Association. It would cost $25 a year, a number chosen in honor of the NRA leadership’s average IQ.
They sent a sample membership card bearing my name and their seal — a bald eagle who has been out hunting food and is headed back to the nest clutching two rifles and a metallic shield decorated with a distortion of the American flag. I’ll bet that went over big when he got back to Mom and the babies in the nest, squealing for something to eat.
I don’t think I’ll join, even though I would get this mighty card displaying the eagle that steals guns (or buys them outside a gun show?) because he can’t catch rabbits. From whom did he steal them? An NRA member, one supposes.
What pantywaists.
They’re probably recruiting me because I used to hunt rabbits with a 90-millimeter gun mounted on an M-1 tank. Now there’s a gun for adults; its bullets are bigger than entire NRA shotguns. You can barely lift one to load it into the breech. We used to fire 90 mm shells out over the Kentucky hills at Fort Knox, along with 50 millimeter machine gun fire and the occasional hand grenade.
The 90-millimeters are best for hunting.
Our typical range was about two miles, so we didn’t have to risk being attacked by our prey. Theoretically, we were firing at old vehicle hulks representing enemy tanks, but we knew we had nailed those vicious rabbits out there somewhere because vultures would begin circling over the target area like NRA lobbyists.
The NRA says no other symbol packs the power of their card – that it stands for responsible gun ownership and has defeated disloyal senators and stopped hundreds of schemes “to ban your guns and close down gun shows, gun shops, ranges, and hunting lands.”
Besides, if your hero is Charlton Heston, you really need a friend.
And if you’re a hunter who bags quail with an AK47, you need a friend with a tranquilizer dart and a straightjacket.
The card wasn’t powerful enough to stop Columbine or Virginia Tech, or to halt the shipment of truckloads of illegal weapons to Mexican drug lords, facilitated by the legal cover of psychotic legislation arranged by responsible gun owners lobbying for the NRA.
All of this is enabled by a gaggle of cowering congressmen who will be a source of bafflement if not hilarity among historians for centuries to come. Many of these unindicted co-conspirators (accessories before the fact of manslaughter) will soon go down the drain with the disintegrating Republican party. The rest we’ll eventually throw out in the primaries.
Then the real sportsmen of America can take back their organization from the extremists who have hijacked it and treacherously misrepresented the genuine hunters, target marksmen, and skeet shooters. They’ll all want to wash their hands.
And ordinary citizens who keep a gun in the house for protection in case of a home invasion –- or, as in my brother’s case, to shoot groundhogs who are trying to burrow under his house –- can relax in the absence of fear-mongering NRA propaganda spreading the cynical fiction that Obama (or anyone else) wants to take all the guns away.
Meantime I’ll save my $25 for the first PAC set up to contribute to the campaign of every congressman who’s been targeted by the NRA.
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I got the same tantalizing invitation: a fancy-looking card with a picture of an eagle and my name in raised letters. I know what you mean; it was hard to pass up. And when I got to thinking about NRA ethos and marketing ploys, I started thinking I’d spent a lifetime in the wrong business. I should have realized early on that there’s big dough in pandering to the paranoid and the stupid (e.g., look at the revenue stream of Fox News). I could just shoot myself! … but I’d better hurry up before Obama takes my gun. Oops! I forgot. I don’t have one.
Comment by Steve Alber — June 15, 2009 @ 1:05 pm
You are a gentleman, a scholar (+ writer, actor, carpenter, fisherperson) and precisely the kind of citizen Plato had in mind for his Republic — the kind who forgets to make money pandering and then forgets he doesn’t have a gun.
Comment by Al — June 15, 2009 @ 6:11 pm