'The NRA must die'

When I wrote yesterday that the National Rifle Association could be accused of stockpiling weapons for a mass murder of American liberals, I meant that as a morally equivalent response to Wayne LaPierre's hysterical raving about an elite conspiracy on the part of gun-control advocates to take away all individual freedoms. If he can say that, I argued, the other side has just as much right and just as much justification to say what I suggested. I seem to have underestimated the extent to which some on the left actually believe something like this.  In the current issue of the local alternative weekly, cleverly titled The Alt,  editor David Howard King goes full LaPierre. "It is time to call the National Rifle Association what it truly is," he writes, "The NRA is a terrorist organization that radicalizes, enables and protects the rights of white nationalists in an ongoing campaign to boost the sale of deadly weapons." Identifying last week's Florida amoklaufer as an "alt-right Trump-supporting shooter," King contends that "The NRA and its myth [that gun ownership is essential to freedom] have turned America into a war zone." Without a single quote to support the charge, King claims that the NRA is "promoting the picture of a world where a gun is the only thing that stands between a white man and 'the savages.'" On this issue's cover, he pronounces, "For Americans to live, the NRA must die." Unsurprisingly, he offers no advice on how to kill the gun lobby beyond voting only for explicitly anti-NRA candidates. How they are to kill the NRA is apparently for them to figure out. Shall it  be declared a terrorist organization, making its members unlawful combatants? Shall it be prosecuted somehow under the RICO laws? Shall we close our eyes and ears and shout, "Go away, go away, go away!" until they disappear? King proves quite unhelpful on this point, but is he not but a voice crying in the wilderness, waiting for that greater one who can cast out the nation's demons? I say let him and LaPierre have a debate. It would be a true contest of equals.