An Asian Christian woman living in London blogging about the everyday issues of religion

Friday 21 December 2012

There are 'good' guys and there are 'bad' guys but both have guns

At a press conference today Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), called on the US Congress to immediately pass legislation to place guards with guns in schools by the time classes resume from winter breaks in January. He said the proposal was aimed at stopping the next killer "waiting in the wings", claiming that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun". 




Good cop, bad cop, good guy, bad guy is an age old demarcation of, quite obviously, bad from good. It is a theme that recurs in movies, plays, books, your neighbourhood, among your friends and enemies and even in the bible. Unlike in the movies though the good guys do not always win. There is also another consideration, in movies like Pulp Fiction and Clint Eastwood ones the line between good guy with a gun and bad guy with a gun was fuzzy and confused. Good and bad can be fused sometimes. 
But in the world of the NRA, if good guys were armed they would be able to shoot down the bad guys. All it takes is a good guy to have a gun so when the bad guy turns up he, well, had better watch out. The good will cancel out the bad. 
The twisted logic of the NRA and the perverse argument that it peddles to safeguard the vested interest that it has is the real 'bad guy'  here. The power of a gun emanates in equal measure from the purpose that it has, to kill or maim, as much as from the person pulling the trigger. I have never held a gun but it doesn't take an idiot to work out that the skill and dexterity of using one must lie in the swiftness of pulling the trigger and the accuracy of an aim. In other words what if the bad guy is a much better shooter than the good guy? The NRA's stupid logic presupposes that a higher form of wisdom will prevail in judgement during a shooting to ensure that good will triumph over evil.  
The only higher form of wisdom we need here is something steeped in morality and prayers to ensure that such demeaning and worthless justifications do not allow the current situations of mass killings to recur. 

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