“It’s straight outta the playbook”
I guess we’ve always known that many of the gun nuts were also just … nuts. But the QAnon-style lunacy is thriving among those who worship guns:
Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was not a rifle, but mental illness, shadowy forces of evil or, as one man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt put it, the “destruction of our children” by the teachings of the left.
In Uvalde, a makeshift memorial of white wooden crosses had gone up for the 19 children and two adults slain. But at the NRA meeting in Houston, less than 300 miles away, the shooting had been reduced to a sling stone in the broader culture wars. The slaughter, it was universally agreed, was a tragedy. But gun owners saw themselves as set upon, too.
The Second Amendment, former President Donald Trump said, was “totally under siege.” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said the “real goal” of many politicians on the left “is disarming America.” Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota who, like Cruz, may run for president in 2024, warned, “Now is not the time to cave to the woke culture.”
“It’s not a gun control problem. It’s a demon control problem,” said Joe Chambers, who had traveled to the conference from Porter, Texas.
His wife, Ana, gestured to the TV cameras and demonstrators outside: “This is all propaganda,” she said. “They’ll use anything to make us look bad.”
On Friday, as the NRA opened its Memorial Day weekend conference, Trump said that if he runs for president again in 2024 and wins, he will adopt a more militaristic approach to public safety, pledging to “crack down on violent crime like never before.”…
“Why did it happen three days ago?” asked Jim Hollis, a lifetime NRA benefactor from St. Louis. “I’m not sure that there are not forces someplace that somehow find troubled people and nurture and develop them and push them for their own agendas.”
Hollis, who asserted the shooter in Uvalde “could have walked in there with a baseball bat and possibly killed as many kids,” feared the “the attack on gun rights” was “strengthening” after Uvalde.
“There are people who thought they could use this Uvalde situation to dampen this [meeting],” he said.
Said another man, who declined to give his name, at the conference: “It’s straight out of a playbook.”
Delusional, whiny, malicious, violent and dumb. The definition of the MAGA right.
Here is one of their leaders making the case as no one else can:
The AR-15 isn’t the issue because he could’ve done the “exact same thing” with a bat, bomb or machete. He says gun owners are unfairly “stigmatatized,” and the real problem is that “crazy teachers are indoctrinating kids.”
And these people have the gall to constantly lecture the anti-automatic weapon activists for not “understanding guns.” Yet they think that there’s no difference in lethal force between a baseball bat and a semi-automatic weapon.
Another one:
That’s Marge Greene passing on a far-right lie that the shooter was trans. The truly is a malevolent monster.
As I said, delusional, whiny, malicious, violent and dumb. That’s Ultra-MAGA and they wear it proudly.