EDITORIAL

It's never been about the kids

David A. Lombardo

The National Rifle Association issued a statement on Thursday expressing concern over its meeting with President Obama saying, "We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment."

On the surface one could commend the President as the White House held meetings with most of the major stakeholders in the issue ranging from New York City's Mayor Bloomberg's Mayors Against Guns to the NRA and those in between. He even had the good sense not to put them all in the same room at the same time though squaring off and duking it out might have been fairer than the high stakes poker game they played with a stacked deck.

Of course the NRA was invited to the show; there wouldn't have been a show if they'd been excluded. The NRA was window dressing; they served no other purpose than to be a sound bite expressing how the administration reached out to all concerned parties and took their counsel into consideration. Let's face it, inviting the NRA to the White House to discuss a reasonable course of action to solve gun violence was the moral equivalent of inviting a chicken to lunch at KFC.

The meeting disappoints me too but for a markedly different reason. What disappoints me is the NRA would issue a public statement saying they were disappointed. Seriously? The millions of dollars donated to the NRA's Institute for Legislative Affairs are being handled by someone who didn't know this Administration considers the NRA to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Someone who doesn't understand this has nothing to do with keeping children safe? If it were about keeping children safe we'd put armed guards in schools or better yet, as an increasing number of school boards are now advocating, letting educators carry concealed weapons.

The anti-gun crowd scoffs at it, though they didn't when President Clinton initiated a program to do it which, to this day, has schools with law enforcement officers in residence. Now they belittle the NRA's position to do the same thing yet the President's children go to a school with armed guards and the President, Mayors Bloomberg and Emanuel, and a host of other anti-gun elected officials are surrounded by armed guards. If it doesn't work why are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars for them and their families to have armed guards?

It has never been about keeping children safe and it never will be about keeping children safe. Let's get this straight. The left's psychotic need for gun control is only about keeping ever increasingly tyrannical politicians safe. They can hardly wait for the next tragedy to occur so they can once again tout the need to disarm the public; Second Amendment be damned.

The recurring question these hypocrites ask, and they have the temerity to ask it behind a wall of armed guards - a protection they would deny their own constituents - is, "why does a civilian need as assault weapon." Setting aside for the moment that the term assault weapon is a manufactured term to demonize a firearm based only on its appearance, the very act of them asking the question is exactly why civilians need an assault rifle.