NRA, you got a LOT of 'splaining to do!

In a recent COUNTERPUNCH article, Ken Levy contends that the National Rifle Association is at fault, in part and in whole, for firearms violence in America.

If You Don’t Support Gun Control, Then You Don’t Support the Police:

The NRA and their Republican supporters’ enthusiastic encouragement and passage of lax gun laws and policies over the past 30 years have sadly enabled hundreds of thousands of senseless, needless deaths and injuries. It’s high time, then, that they atone for their destructive influence by renouncing the same old unproductive, callous platitudes and canards and finally getting on board with a sensible multi-pronged approach that includes gun control. In the end, this is really the only way to honor the Baton Rouge and Dallas police officers who were viciously murdered – and to better protect all of the police officers who are still serving.

Ken Levy is the Holt B. Harrison Associate Professor of Law at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University.

It will be a fine day when Academics contain their lectures to their classrooms, where they are free to brainwash instruct their mallable students on the canons of Liberalism.

Unfortunately, they often feel obliged to lecture grown-ups as well.  In doing so, they demonstrate their Ivory Tower bigotry and flaunt their assumed intellectual superiority.

The good professor might spend some time with real police officers, who have said, recently and emphatically, that they cannot be everywhere; they cannot counter terrorism alone, and they encourage private citizens to arm themselves in order to promote the general wellfare.

(I think I read that last part here in DC, here in Ohio, here in Florida. )

Levy's polemic includes a duty of the citizen to "... protect all of the police officers who are still serving".

Funny, here's another thing I think I read somewhere:

"To Protect, And To Serve"

Oh, yes, now I remember.   It was written on the door of a police car.  

In fact, virtually all of the police cars in America carry that oath.

Levy confuses the roles which Americans assume with roles which Liberals take for granted.

For example, police assume the role of enforcement of the law.  While they claim to "protect", their ability to protect anyone is exceedingly limited.  They can't stop someone from gettting shot, for example ... even their fellow officers.  They would like to but "we can't be everywhere" is just a truth that we all learn to live with.

Levy's assumed role is, apparently, to criticize the people who are trying to make a difference because they don't meet his standards of ... uh ... "difference-making".

No, he won't criticize the police who cannot 'be everywhere'.  

But he WILL criticize American citizens who choose to arm themselves in defense of themselves and others, even though these people CAN  'be everywhere'.

Levy is laboring under the misguided assumption that, if firearms were universally prohibited, America would truly be a land of peace.

He should take a look at Australia and Great Britain,  the Liberals' best exemplar.   Private citizens there aren not often murdered by firearms (although they sometimes are), but they find themselves in a state of aggressiveness against which they have no defense.   The elderly, women, minorities ... all find themselves targets of hoodlums, and the police cannot protect them.   And they cannot protect themselves.   Witness the increased number of rapes and other assaults in England and Europe.  Those victims have no way to protect themselves, because firearms are forbidden ... and only the law-abiding are disarmed.

The assaults suffered there are "just hooliganism" ... victimization by your neighbors.

Compared with terrorism (where people who don't live where you live, but still they wish to murder as many of you as they can) the "unarmed, law abiding citizen" has, literally, no defense at all.  And like the hooligans, the terrorists know that.

In America ... perhaps the only thing which dissuades terrorists from more frequent, more brutal armed attacks is the fact that they may run into a citizen with a gun.

One thing is certain:   terrorist assaults with firearms only occur in "Gun Free Zones".
Such as California.