“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in today’s long-overdue statement.

And once again I have to say, “Are you freaking kidding me?  Are you?  Is it possible that you only happen to be acting in the most cynical and subversive manner possible?  Can you actually believe that everything about American society is at fault for gun violence except guns?”  

It makes no sense.  We don’t blame movies and bad parenting exclusively for vehicular homicides and leave cars out of the equation.  We certainly don’t say the only answer is for the rest of the people on the road to drive aggressively and recklessly because the only thing that stops a bad guy behind the wheel is a good guy behind the wheel.

Yet in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Wayne LaPierre took an entire week to come up with “more guns” as the solution to our problem.  Everybody should be carrying a gun.  Then everybody will be safe.  The streets and movie theaters and churches and schools will be safe because we’ll all know that any of the people around us could be packing heat and that if we upset or offend them, they could take us out.  Of course we have that option, too, so it all balances out.  Sadly, we have no way of knowing what the other person’s trigger might be or how much more willing they may be to fire than we are.

I have news for Mr. LaPierre.  The biggest problem with his solution (though there are many others) is that nobody thinks he’s the bad guy with the gun.  Even the crazy ones don’t think they’re the bad guys.  We’re all our own judges and we will invariably cast ourselves in the role of hero or stalwart citizen.  In the minds of mass murderers the people they kill are to blame for something – hence the victims are bad guys without guns and the killers are the good guys with the guns.  So the final decision on good versus bad will still only be made after the bloodbath.

Let me point out one other fault that’s a little closer to my heart.  I have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun.  I also have terrible eyesight.  I mean really terrible.  So terrible, in fact, that I can’t get a license to drive a car.  I can get a gun, though.  So let’s say I was a hardline, “from my cold, dead hands” type and I went out and got a gun and a concealed carry permit.  Then say I was at Sandy Hook or at the movie theater in Aurora.  Say I was the only good guy with a gun, because of course I am the “good guy.”  Would anyone want me spraying bullets around the room, aiming largely by the sound of ricocheting shots from the “bad guy”?  I can assure you they wouldn’t.  And I wouldn’t either.

One final thing:  Mr. LaPierre did not wait a week to speak about the Sandy Hook shootings out of anything but concern for himself and his organization.  Nor did most of the gun-rights supporters in Congress.  They have been working tirelessly for years to make sure it’s easier to get a gun than to set up a bar at a wedding reception, somehow never thinking that would lead to anything the rest of us would object to very strongly.  If the situation weren’t so tragic, it would be funny that the people who are so determined to put a gun in every hand are simply too cowardly to face a crowd and justify their actions.

P.S.  Guns aren’t the only problem here, but they are most definitely an integral part.  It’s time the nay-sayers own up to that.