[National Rifle Association (NRA) is an enormously powerful
organization in America and it has always presented a dilemma for me, as an
Indian American blogger of American political matters. You see, there is
absolutely nothing in India that can be compared to NRA. I can always compare
the Republicans and Democrats to the UPA and NDA; I can compare the various
factions of the Democrats or Republicans to the regional satraps (such as DMK,
Shiv Sena, Mullahyam, Lallu and so on). But there is nothing that comes even
close to the nature and clout of the NRA. Indian democracy has a lot more
decades to grow and mature (!) before anything like NRA comes up.]
In the wake of the heinous school shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary, Mr. Wayne Lapierre, the CEO of National Rifle Association (NRA),
claimed that he would advocate putting armed guards in schools as a preventive
measure against gun-violence (oops, my bad. It is not gun-violence, it is
people-violence. As the NRA and the gun-enthusiasts constantly remind us, “Guns
don’t kill people; People kill people”). Since then, I was eager to meet with
him. Here was a man who had an absolutely brilliant way of solving problems. I
was dying to meet him and enlist his help in solving really vexing issues
facing the world, such as poverty, hunger, AIDS, global economic slowdown,
Indian cricket team’s pathetic performance and so on. And it wasn’t long before
I had the opportunity to meet him in person. You see, as an Indian American
blogger of American political matters, nobody refuses me when I want to
interview them. I called my Republican contact (the one who had welcomed me
into GOP’s Post-Mortem session) and he happily set up a meeting with the
brilliant Mr. LaPierre. He agreed to meet me on a large shooting range
somewhere in the Midwest.
As I approached the shooting range for our meeting, I was
feeling a sense of inadequacy and inferiority. As a kid growing up in India I
had almost no familiarity with people
(remember, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Ergo, gun = people).
When I was in NCC (National Cadet Corps) I was given a very old people, a bolt-action Enfield 303 and I
had the privilege of shooting 20 rounds in an open shooting range with that old
people. My people was rusty and heavy and had to be reloaded after every 5
rounds. We had to go and retrieve the fired rounds. With such a pathetic
experience with people, I was
legitimately apprehensive about meeting Mr. LaPierre. But the comely
receptionist put me at ease and offered me her own people, a small handpeople
with .22 caliber (As a policy, Mr. LaPierre meets people only when they are
carrying at least one people with
them, unloaded of course). Even though the inside of NRA maintains the policy
of carrying only unloaded weapons (this is really nice of them. They want the
rest of the America to be full of loaded weapons, but the inside of their
building to be unloaded), she assured me that it was empty for my own
protection. She was afraid that I might accidentally shoot myself or other people
with that people. She ushered me into
a large conference room that was adorned with portraits of various people. No,
these were the real people, human beings. Not people, the instruments with which people kill people. Carl Walther,
Bartolomeo Beretta, Richard Gatling, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Oliver Winchester and
many other pioneers in the science of killing people efficiently, that either
invented or popularized the various peoples
such as Walther PPK, Beretta 0.25, AK-47, Winchester etc. I sat awkwardly,
twirling the little people around my
finger.
Mr. LaPierre entered the room and extended his hand for a
handshake. I scrambled to my feet and the little people fell from my hands. We began the interview.
WL: Shoot!
Me: (Sheepishly) I wouldn’t know how to. (Then I saw a look
of incomprehension on WL’s face and realized that the command ‘shoot’ was for
me to begin the interview)
Me: Oh, sorry about the misunderstanding. Mr. LaPierre, I
would like to congratulate you for the brilliant suggestion you made recently
to solve the problem of school shootings. Can you please elaborate a little on
that?
WL: Certainly. We, at NRA, believe that the only way to stop
the shootings in the schools is to put armed guards in the school and also to
teach the teachers how to shoot straight in case a madman barges into their
school and starts shooting people. Better still, we should hire gun-enthusiasts
as teachers and let them carry their arsenal when they go for teaching. The
current teaching credentials program is highly inadequate. It doesn’t include a
firearms-based self-defense training and what is the result? Any idiot can walk
into a school and shoot up the place while the teachers try to hide behind
desks or in the closets instead of shooting the bastard down. Tell me what is
more important in a school? Teaching the kids or shooting the idiots trying to
kill them? Think of the collateral benefits. We have millions of unemployed
people in this country and many of them are great with firearms. We can solve
the unemployment problem with a simple change in our education policy. We can
hire a bunch of unemployed people and train them to use firearms if they don’t
know them already. Then we hire them as teachers or school marshals just like
the airlines do. It is simple really; the only thing that stops a bad guy with
a gun is a good guy with a gun. In fact we are also considering a
recommendation to teach kids how to shoot so that they can defend themselves.
Anyway most of the boys shoot Nerf guns and water guns at home. So why not the
real guns? Shooting should be a mandatory subject along with math and science.
Me: I believe this is absolutely a great idea. If school
kids are dying of guns, what could be smarter than putting more guns in their
vicinity? But let me play the devil’s advocate here for a moment. As some of my
liberal friends have pointed out, what if the so-called armed guard goes crazy
and starts shooting? What if he falls asleep on the job and some kids purloin
the gun, purely as a prank, and accidently end up shooting other kids? What if
the armed guard is trigger-happy and starts shooting at imaginary threats and
ends up accidently shooting kids or teachers? What if teachers go bonkers in
the middle of a school day due to the stress of dealing with pesky kids and
start shooting up the place? These irritating liberals believe that the only
thing that is preferable to a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with no gun, or
at least, “a bad guy with no gun is better than a bad guy with a pistol, who,
in turn, is better than a bad guy with a semi-automatic assault rifle with
large magazines”. I know, it is really stupid of them liberals to use logic in
an issue that deals with guns, but you can’t cure them. But can you at least
answer them?
WL: Are you nuts? Who told you that the school kids are
dying of guns? Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. In any case, we are
America and we have the second amendment that gives us the right to bear AR-15,
AK-47, Uzi and Galil and whatever else we feel like. You can’t take away that
right.
Me: But my liberal friends say that the right to bear arms
does not mean the right to bear any and all arms under the sun. Self-defense
and hunting and gun collection can be achieved without resorting to firing 100
rounds in under a minute. If you extend the logic that all guns are covered
under the second amendment, then why not the RPG’s or LMG’s or HMG’s? Heck, why
not go all the way and include nuclear weapons under the rubric of the right to
bear arms?
WL: Why not indeed? We have been lobbying the Congress for a
long time to include all and any weapons under the definition of arms as
covered by the second amendment.
Me: But don’t you think that the American public has had
enough of the whole ‘right to bear arms’ being taken to any extremes? There
seems to be a groundswell of support for banning the military-style weapons and
the large clips. I believe that a sensible gun policy and the 2nd
amendment can coexist. DO you think there will come a time when the electoral
results will force the politicians to rethink their support to the extreme
interpretations of the rights accorded by the Bill of Rights?
WL: Are you nuts? This country owns more firearms than the
rest of the world combined. You think all those firearms are owned by banks?
They are owned by the American people. Your paltry money can never fight
against the deep pockets we have. If you challenge us in the courts, we have 7
of the nine judges on the Supreme court owning the guns and believing in the
rights which our constitution has bestowed on us. You are talking election?
Bring it on, I say. And a good day to you, you liberal, commie, gun-hating
joker.
Mr. Lapierre stormed out of the room.
When Abraham Lincoln described the democracy as a system of
government that was by the people, of the people and for the people, he
probably had a different country in mind. Today America is a government that is
by the people, of the people and for the people.
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