Clearly, blog output has an inverse relationship to fun. What’s got my fun meter pegged? My first solo tour at the Pima Air & Space Museum, now less than 24 hours away. I’ve been cramming: memorizing facts about aircraft ancient and modern, deciding which planes to skip over and which to concentrate on, finding a theme to tie it all together, working up an entertaining spiel.
My first tour, tomorrow morning at 9:30, is really a practice tour, a favor for a dear friend. Her daughter’s getting married Saturday. Friday, while the bridal party is off doing whatever women do the day before a wedding, I’m taking the groom’s party on a guided museum tour. Sure, I could just walk around the exhibits with them, but since my first “real” tour with paying customers is scheduled for Wednesday, June 1st, I’m going to practice on the wedding guests and give them the tour I’m preparing for. Hence all this last-minute study.
——————–
Yesterday a friend alerted me to an article about far-right gun nuts, who are starting to say on blogs and AM hate radio that the January Tucson shootings were staged, part of an ongoing government attempt to disarm American citizens. A couple of them showed up at a victim’s house here in Tucson the other day, stalking the guy in an effort to get the goods on him and prove he was faking. No doubt they’ve got Gabby’s rehab facility and the home of the murdered schoolgirl’s family staked out too.
Well, of course there are people who would believe this nonsense. The right-to-bear conspiracists can probably tie the moon landings, the killing of bin Laden, and the Fukushima reactor meltdowns into their imaginary plot.
I mentioned this on Facebook and said I smelled a rat, and that the rat I had in mind was the leadership of the NRA. Naturally several friends leapt to the NRA’s defense. But the NRA has been, if not the source of, at least a friend of nearly every crazy they’re-coming-to-take-our-guns-away story that’s come up over the past two or three decades. It got so bad that in 1995 former President George H.W. Bush resigned from the NRA over one of their crazier pronouncements.
When I was a kid, I associated the NRA with hunting and scouting. When I think of the NRA today, I think of militia movements, white separatism, and domestic right-wing terrorism.
Is the NRA behind the people who are stalking Tucson shooting victims? Probably not. But I’m willing to bet we won’t hear anyone in the NRA’s leadership condemning them, either. This kind of stuff is right up their alley.
——————–
Have you ever heard the saying about the perfect being the enemy of the good? I never really knew what that meant until this morning, when Donna went with me to pick up a rental tux for Saturday’s wedding. I thought I looked like a million bucks. Donna wants me to look like a million and change. I thought we’d never get out of the place! OMG does she read this blog? I’d better shut up and just look pretty.
And let’s not forget who profits most from the NRA, its lobbyists, and the gun nuts: the gun manufacturers. As they say in Latin, Qui bono? A useful English translation is: Follow the money.
The people that profit the most from the NRA, are the citizens whose inherent rights, protected by the Second Amendment, are under constant attack. Aside, I am not qui bono means follow the money. ?