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Bill Moyers: NRA is an armed bully
A hard rule in American journalism is you can trash an amorphous group, just don't target an individual.

Moyers bravely does this as he burnishes his fascist credentials.
Back when Charlton Heston made that defiant boast at the NRA convention -- that gun control advocates would have to pry his rifle from his cold dead hands -- he must have thought he was back in the fantasy world of Hollywood, re-living his roles as those famous Indian killers Andrew Jackson and Buffalo Bill Cody, whose Wild West, as he called it, courses through the bloodstream of American mythology. For sure, Heston was not channeling his most famous role as Moses striding down from Mount Sinai with a tablet of stone inscribed with God's blueprint for a civilized society, including the commandment: "Thou Shalt Not Kill."
It helps, Bill, if you ignore the egregious encroachment of government in privates lives, which has accelerated since 2001, so the straw man of Hollywood fantasy works. Otherwise it's just as old and tired as the notion that the government protects everyone with the draconian guns law we have on the books.
Rant on.
Oh. My. God. Mr. Moyers, as I recall, is "The Power of Myth" man. As such, it behooves him to get it right more than the rest of those bleating about "Thou shalt not kill." What it says in the original Hebrew, my dear pseudo-intellectual, is, "No murdering." To murder, since you seem to be having difficulties with your native tongue, is to kill unlawfully. There are plenty of Hebrew Bible laws requiring lawful killing, such as the waging of war, the punishment of certain crimes, and even the occasional case of taking revenge. You probably don't recall that Judith, in the time of the Judges of the Israelites -- she was a judge in good standing, as it happens, an early example of the standing of women in the Jewish tradition, as it happens -- invited an enemy general to her tent for dinner, fed him, then killed him by pounding a tent peg through his skull as he slept. Not murder, and therefore highly approved.
/Rant
But the good lord seems not to have anticipated the National Rifle Association. Its conscience as cold and dead as Charlton Heston's grip on his gun, the NRA has become the armed bully of American politics, the enabler of the gunfighter nation, whose exceptionalism includes a high tolerance for the slaughter of the innocent. "Mother Jones" magazine reports that at least 194 children have been shot to death since Newtown. 127 of them died in their own homes and dozens more in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives, not strangers. 72 pulled the trigger themselves or were shot by another youngster.
Terrible. No excuse for poor firearms handling and for killing of victims outside of self defense.
And I didn't know Bill Moyers was a Christian. Cool! We can reliably expect him to STFU about guns any moment now.
My native state of Texas leads the country in the number of young ones killed by guns. While some states passed tougher firearms legislation after Newtown, Texas enacted ten new laws against sane restrictions on guns.
That's "sane", sirrah. Though why anything known to be ineffective in its design would be considered sane is beyond me.
Which is partly why last month, four women had lunch at a restaurant just outside Dallas. It was a planning meeting for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, that's a group started after Newtown that describes itself as the "Mothers Against Drunk Driving of gun reform."
Oh, good. Another group created to massage government statistics in order to direct public policy, and further reinforce a state monopoly on armed violence. It is called using the armed might of the state as your personal agenda-enforcing army. You know that morality thing, Bill, you know, the Lord? Something not quite moral about attacking your citizens using the power of the state. I don't think that is what He had in mind.
As the four women ate and talked, about 40 members of a pro-gun group called Open Carry Texas -- champions of guns anywhere and everywhere -- gathered outside the restaurant, many of them with their firearms. They said they were there not to intimidate but to make a point. Sure, as if real men need guns to make a point.
Moyers is writing about a false event; I know, surprising for a liberal, right?. The event with the open carry folks was planned weeks before this incident, and as far as I know, none of the two groups interacted, so there was no, as in zero intimidation. And if there was, there's a simple solution. Get a gun.
So it goes. "Thou Shalt Not Kill,"
See rant, above.
but if you do, hide behind the Second Amendment, made holier and more sacrosanct by the NRA than God's own commandment.
I said it before: With something north of 150 million firearms int the US, the peace that that has brought is a testament to undoing our firearms laws.
Posted by: badanov 2013-12-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=381948