Robert Parry- Ironically the NRA suggests a police state [View all]

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http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/23/nra-suggests-a-police-state/
by Robert Parry
NRA Suggests a Police State
December 23, 2012
Exclusive: The irony of the NRA’s crackpot idea for protecting America’s children by dramatically expanding the use of armed guards is that the proposal would push the U.S. further down the path toward a police state, threatening the “liberties” that the NRA claims it wants to ensure, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

If one follows the “logic” of the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre, the United States should become an armed camp with armored-up police carrying high-powered weapons stationed at virtually every location where children might congregate and where a crazy person might show up with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

After all, why stop at protecting schools? A mentally unstable individual could just as easily walk into a shopping mall at Christmas and murder kids waiting to talk to Santa Claus or enter a theater showing a Disney film and open fire on the tiny movie-goers or stroll onto a field where children are playing soccer and empty a 100-round magazine.
The National Rifle Association’s graphic for its proposed “National School Shield.”

snip

No, we would need “good guys with guns” at least equal in firepower to the “bad guys with guns.” That is, if we were to apply LaPierre’s reasoning as expressed at the NRA’s news conference on Friday, belatedly responding to the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, a week earlier.

So, rather than enact commonsense gun-control laws that could begin ratcheting down America’s crazy arms race, LaPierre recommends escalating the arms race by turning pretty much the entire country into security zones, the sort that U.S. airports have become, except at airports the passengers are not allowed to carry guns.

Everywhere else – if LaPierre and the NRA’s benefactors in the gun industry have their way – “good guys” will be wielding lethal weapons for self-defense and for the defense of others, unless, of course, one of the “good guys” snaps and suddenly becomes a “bad guy.” Or a “good guy” might misinterpret a move by a suspected “bad guy” and start blasting away under the NRA’s “stand your ground” principle.