Wayne LaPierre in the Wasteland
After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.Anti-gun New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had already done everything he could to prevent law-abiding New Yorkers from owning guns, and he has made sure that no ordinary citizen will ever be allowed to carry a gun. He even refused to allow the National Guard into the city to restore civil order because Guardsmen carry guns!--Wayne LaPierre, Stand and Fight
Wayne LaPierre's newest op ed piece lays it on the line--America is already a Hobbesian hell under the Obama/Soros regime and things will only get worse. Al Qaeda and drug gangs are pouring over the borders; after the fiscal collapse, the police will go out of business. Every law abiding American needs to arm themselves now.Yes, there was some looting and lawlessness in the immediate wake of Sandy in Coney Island, damaged homes in Breezy Point and Staten Island were burgled, there were hardships and suffering all over, but there was nothing like the wholesale breakdown of civil order that LaPierre describes. That was a different city and a different hurricane (and as I remember, the problem in New Orleans wasn't a lack of guns). But to the Americans that Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are directing their increasingly unhinged appeals to, all cities are the same.Debunking a propagandist like LaPierre point by point is a bit like trying to change Alex Jones's mind about the Bilderbergs. But as a Brooklynite, I couldn't let those paragraphs stand unchallenged. Even if you think the police cook the statistics, New York City's crime rates are quite low in comparison to other large cities. And even if the hurricane meant that some crimes weren't reported, the official figures suggest that there was something less than a tsunami of lawlessness. There were 86 percent less murders in New York City the week after Sandy than in the same calendar period a year before; grand larcenies were down 48%, auto thefts were down 24%, and felony assaults dropped 31%. As for the armed hordes pouring over our southern border, it's interesting to note that El Paso was just rated the US's safest large city for the third year in a row. New York came in third, after San Diego.When you read something like this, you realize what's really behind the gun movement's extremism. It isn't abstract rights at all. It's concrete hatreds, and its objects are the things that right wing populists have always fixated on: minorities, immigrants, cities. It is The New Hate writ large.And to say that isn't to demonize gun owners. It's to make the point that the NRA is an extremist right wing organization, a fringe group that speaks for a tiny (and dangerous) minority.
