Thank you, National Rifle Association. Thank you, Congressman Gary Miller

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«Posted for RED EMMA»

GRADE for Congressman Gary G. Miller:

A

—from Project Vote Smart’s Congressional Rating Record on the National Rifle Association/ILA.

.RED IS TOLD by those who divine these techno-details that of those hundreds out there in the ‘sphere who read last week’s provocative and polemical (and satirical) Miller posting (Meeting with Congressman Miller), many maintain addresses in Congressional offices or party headquarters. No doubt some wiseacre will now go tell on Red Emma to his elected rep, blowing any chances at further meetings with Congressman Gasbag. And it’s a darn shame cuz I had my Confederate uniform all spit-polished and my Stars’n’Bars dry-cleaned.

.Of course, delivering more of the goods on Gary G. Miller (not to be confused with George Miller of the 7th district, who earns an F, god bless him, from the weapons industry) isn’t that hard and, as you will note, his connection to events at Virginia Tech yesterday are as easy, and therefore, ignored, as the nifty grade he receives re “gun rights” voting. But I am getting ahead of myself.

.On this bloody second day, Red Emma chooses his words especially carefully toward offering the respect and awe which violence demands, especially violence which chooses its targets so carefully, so deliberately, from a community of young people, children really, at an educational institution on a Monday morning in the United States. This is hard to do perhaps, when you are weeping, shaking, restless, disturbed—as I have been since Monday morning. There is the sound of gunshots in the distance, played over and over on the radio, interviews with a professor barricaded and a student weeping. I feel I know these people. Working at home yesterday, listening to NPR in the background, I waited, all too familiar with the scene, and The Script which accompanied it. Yet in spite of the dark curtain, or because of it, my mind, perhaps panicked or trying for self-defense, looked for meaning, and even more desperately than usual.

.As with past shootings, and the reports of them, I was anticipating The Script, admittedly important and necessary, of shock and horror and disbelief. Anger, by the way, is an important and justified emotion here, as I intimate below. Naturally, it is almost always missing from The Script.

.But we have been here before, so that one loses patience with The Script. The power of intellect offers us some reprieve from the grief and the horror. The effort to obscure, neglect, and ignore the singular and most obvious element of a problem, over and over and over again, through so many years and too many similar episodes, can’t, finally be a mistake or an oversight, can it friends? So, yes, there is the breaking horror, the death toll, the story of the killer. So, yes, the story about cell phones and possible police tardiness. So, yes, the caliber of the weapon and the banal profile of a sociopath and the call for healing and the stories of families and the investigation and, of course, the visit to the clergy and the social workers, the “God understands” pabulum and the President of the Nation offering prayer and sympathy and flags at half-mast and a proclamation—all while actually doing, of course, not a thing.

.And, no. No discussion of what is most obvious. No deviation of The Script, except to warn us not to deviate. On Paul Harvey’s dreadful nationally syndicated show this morning, the embrace of a singular and single adjective to describe the shooter, about whom already much was known: “Asian.” What the fuck was that about?

.On “McIntyre in the Morning,” on KABC, the insistence that the topic was not political or part of a discussion of public policy, that it must be relegated to the “religious and philosophical.” This after two callers suggested, as did many on the commercial media apparently, that more guns, as kind of a Cold War deterrence strategy, were the answer. (Teachers with guns, imagine that!)

.Or that we employ something called a “gun box,” a variety of Old West saloon check-em-at-the-door, cowboy protocol. Perhaps at Irvine Valley College this would involve a sign: Welcome to IVC, Home of the Lasers. Leave Your Weapons with the Guard.

.This is not a public policy question? Look no further than The White House, whose spokesman said so too, advising that now was not the right time to even mention gun control policy.

.An elected official I think, or perhaps a campus administrator at V. Tech, anticipated the likes of Red Emma, advising that this issue, which he identified quite clearly as gun control, would not be allowed to be used as a political “hobby horse,” both a clear threat and a diminution of a genuine health and public safety issue. Let’s stop here to practice a bit of what Noam Chomsky calls “intellectual self-defense.” Substitute, say, "clean water" for "gun control" and then follow McIntyre in the Morning’s advice and relegate water quality to the realm of the “religious and philosophical.” Most sane people would laugh out loud and point fingers and make faces and identify the utterer of this nonsense as behaving like somebody with a psychopathology right out of the DSM IV!

.And let’s consider the following: “Was there a specific prayer or verse that you shared?” a reporter asked the university’s campus cleric on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today. Really. And others asked questions about how the university responded and why the police didn’t shut down the campus, as if a campus police force could be held responsible for managing safety against the years and dollars and legal maneuvers and coercion of, yes, the paid professionals (very highly paid) who facilitated and enabled the killing spree, namely, the lobbying wing of the NRA (see above).

.It doesn’t end. The Script is flexible, irrelevant, nuts. Today KPCC, our local NPR affiliate promised, unbelievably, to examine whether there were better ways to communicate emergency situations. Talk about killing the messenger. A sane reporter might have telephoned the NRA or at least reviewed its murderous work. A reporter might have called an elected official who voted straight As for the gun lobby and posed a few whimsical questions. A reporter might have compared the number of gun deaths in the US to those in Canada or Japan or England.

.It ain’t gonna happen. WE need to do it for them, apparently. (For the record, Red Emma called KPCC and asked.)

.Indeed, all of us might simply pick up the phone and call the NRA’s toll-free number and ask for its Legislative Office and, when the nice, polite killer answers, thank this outfit of death for its tremendous and successful work in guaranteeing yesterday’s atrocity and those in the future. The number is 1-800-672-3888.

.Its site, by the way, offers the following unbelievable statement: “The National Rifle Association joins the entire country in expressing our deepest condolences to the families of Virginia Tech University and everyone else affected by this horrible tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families. We will not have further comment until all the facts are known.” (Red’s emphasis, natch.)

.I wonder what “facts” could possibly influence anybody’s decision not to immediately raise the topic of gun control and the bloody work of the gun lobby in the very first moments of news of a shooting of dozens of people? Perhaps the “fact” that the shooter had made his own gun out of old sardine cans, or that he had arrived from a faraway planet where killing people turned them into gods or that an apple pie which he had been eating was suddenly transformed into a Glock 19?

.A political culture which will not admit the most obvious and clear evidence into a discussion is a deeply psychopathological one. In America, now nutty as a loon, it is verboten to say the phrase “gun lobby” or to mention “National Rifle Association.” It is impolite and wrong to call the NRA and the other paid sponsors of perverse “gun rights” and so-called freedoms, the pimps and bandits who make money selling and selling and selling guns but are almost never (today, so far, on most electronic media) called on to account for the obvious, predictable, even necessary result of their awful labor. And it is rude and inappropriate to call one’s elected representatives and ask them not to score so high on the next report card from homicidal maniacs.

.Which is why we must all do it, immediately. To show ourselves and other that we are not insane, and to honor those murdered by the gun lobby and the NRA. To prove that we respect them, ourselves, and the human spirit, despite it all.

Andrew Tonkovich