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Monday, May 6, 2013

Fear-- a feature of the NRA's system

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Jon Stewart gleefully mocks NRA’s blatant contradictions
By Eric W. Dolan, May 7, 2013

On his show Monday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart lampooned the National Rifle Association meeting in Texas.

Many of the speakers at the event over the weekend appeared to forget what the NRA was about and talked about topics like Obamacare, proselytizing in the military and Benghazi. Stewart joked the NRA meeting was just the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC) with cooler, gun-filled introductions.

Speakers at the event blasted Democrats for using emotion-based arguments in favor of stricter gun laws. Conservative radio host Glenn Beck vowed to fight “their tactics of fear” and “their tactics of darkness.” But Stewart showed that Beck offered up his own hyperbolic fear-mongering by saying the only thing preventing your mom and sister from getting raped was a gun. Other speakers warned terrorists had more rights than American citizens, and that “deranged school shooters” and rapists were “waiting and planning and plotting.”

“These types of contradictions — they use fear, we use fear — are not an anomaly, not a bug in the NRA’s system, but a feature,” Stewart said. “At the heart of the NRA’s message is, ‘Don’t let liberals say it’s a dangerous world and scare you into gun control. Let us say it’s a dangerous world and scare you into a gun-a-pa-looza.’”

In another contradiction, Beck portrayed the ever-wishing-to-be-tyrannical government as the bad guy while Wayne LaPierre portrayed the very same terrorist-catching government as the the good guy.

“So police are the good guys and who do they work for? The government. So you have no idea who the good guys are and the bad guys are. In fact, these guys aren’t too sure about the difference between democracy and tyranny either,” Stewart said, playing a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) boasting about his filibuster of legislation that was supported by 9 of 10 Americans. Three minutes later, Cruz demonized Democrats for filibustering his legislation.

Stewart concluded that both sides of the debate wanted “bad guys not to have guns.” While himself and others thought criminal background checks were a good start, the NRA and its colleagues believed the best approach was to “wait for a bad guy to draw and then draw faster.”

“If that’s what you want. OK, we’ll have that debate. But stop pretending that background checks are the last barrier standing between a free America and Obama-sponsored government mom rape.”
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