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Editorial: In Houston, the NRA show goes on -- like Uvalde never happened
If the NRA had any compassion or humanity, this even would be cancelled
Link to tweet
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-In-Houston-NRA-show-goes-on-like-17202149.php?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=twitter.com
Three days after a teenager slaughtered 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in a little Texas town called Uvalde and 13 days after a teen white supremacist used the same sort of high-powered semi-automatic rifle to murder 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket, the loyal people of the gun are coming to Houston.
In light of what’s happened in the past few days, it’s hard to imagine a less appropriate time or place for the National Rifle Association to hold its annual meeting, a gathering the writer Evan Osnos has described as a combination of political convention, trade show and Comic-Con.
No organization in America has done more to delude Americans that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of gun rights is so rigidly absolute that even the most common-sense gun rules — such as licenses and basic training — are verboten. Nothing in our history, or in nearly 250 years of Supreme Court rulings, supports anything like that proposition, but the terrible power of the NRA’s lobbyists and its free-spending PACs have made it gospel in states such as Texas, where well-compensated elected officials have all but sworn fealty to its twisted mandates.
We considered calling on convention organizers to scrap their program and replace it with three days of discussion, reflection and sober reassessment in an effort to seek solutions to a grave national crisis — a crisis for which the NRA bears out-sized responsibility. Sensible gun reforms would be part of those discussions, but so would many other aspects of our violence-drenched society. Still, that was never going to happen, either.
In light of what’s happened in the past few days, it’s hard to imagine a less appropriate time or place for the National Rifle Association to hold its annual meeting, a gathering the writer Evan Osnos has described as a combination of political convention, trade show and Comic-Con.
No organization in America has done more to delude Americans that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of gun rights is so rigidly absolute that even the most common-sense gun rules — such as licenses and basic training — are verboten. Nothing in our history, or in nearly 250 years of Supreme Court rulings, supports anything like that proposition, but the terrible power of the NRA’s lobbyists and its free-spending PACs have made it gospel in states such as Texas, where well-compensated elected officials have all but sworn fealty to its twisted mandates.
We considered calling on convention organizers to scrap their program and replace it with three days of discussion, reflection and sober reassessment in an effort to seek solutions to a grave national crisis — a crisis for which the NRA bears out-sized responsibility. Sensible gun reforms would be part of those discussions, but so would many other aspects of our violence-drenched society. Still, that was never going to happen, either.
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