Chris Brown on Wayne La Pierre and the Fast and Furious Scandal

Chris Brown wrote a wonderful article for Media Matters about the NRA and the Fast and Furious scandal.

The pattern from National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is getting pretty clear: ad hominem name-calling, a slew of conspiratorial misinformation, and a call for gun owners to align with the NRA's political agenda and defeat President Obama based on those ginned-up grievances.

For months, LaPierre's been pushing interlinked false talking points on the trafficking of U.S. guns to Mexico in a variety of media formats. According to the NRA leader, requiring gun dealers to report multiple sales of rifles Mexican cartels are known to favor to the ATF is an assault against American gun owners. He's also claimed the Obama administration intentionally manufactured a crisis by allowing U.S. guns to fall into the hands of cartels to justify more gun control.

This time speaking through the NRA's many publications LaPierre gets explicit about why he's been pushing those claims: it's all about attacking President Obama. From the piece:

All of this was done to bring about Barack Obama's promised "under the radar" gun control.
[...]
Gun owners must begin marshalling our collective power to unelect not only Obama and his crowd, but to unelect his anti-gun-owner axis in Congress.

Getting back to his roots, LaPierre starts by throwing around insults, referring to people to who disagree with the NRA about the role of U.S. guns in Mexico as "ghouls":

This move by unelected bureaucrats is part of a plan that was hatched at the outset of the Obama administration with the full support of a host of media enablers. Those in the gun-ban crowd are ghouls, always in search of a "crisis" to feed on.

One minor point, which I find absolutely hysterical, is the word "ghoul" used by La Pierre. Not too long ago some of my commenters started calling me that particular name. Now I see where it came from. You see, in the gun-rights movement there's very little thinking going on, there's just repeating the NRA talking points right down to the name-calling. These guys are a riot.

Chris debunks the two major lies which Wayne La Pierre has been pushing. The downplaying of the role of gun dealers along the border in supplying guns to Mexico is answered by this:

As Media Matters reported in August:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) has seized more 10,000 firearms and more then 1.1. million rounds of ammunition headed to the southwest border since 2006. On the Mexican side of the border, 20,504 or 70 percent of the total firearms seized and submitted for tracing in the last two years were from the United States.

The other lie was that the Fast and Furious botched sting operation is responsible for a significant number of the smuggled guns. It was handled like this:

Nor do the numbers back up the contention that Fast and Furious fueled a large spike in Mexican cartel crime guns traced to the United States. The Washington Post reported in July that 227 guns related to Fast and Furious had been recovered in Mexico. If all of those guns were part of the trace data it would account for only 1 percent of U.S. sourced guns traced in the last two years.

What's your opinion? If the ability to own a gun were really the civil right they say it is, why would they have to resort to so much distortion and misdirection to protect it? Why would the gun-rights advocates so often resort to name-calling and general nastiness? Why would the issue be so controversial?

I'll tell you why. Because they're wrong. Gun rights, which leads to gun availability to those who are unfit to responsibly handle guns, is a plague on our country. Reasonable people know this, even reasonable gun owners. It's the small, very vocal and very well financed minority, led by unscrupulous men like Wayne La Pierre who are responsible for the controversy as well as the gun availability itself.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.