Ted Nugent: Get More Guns Into Schools So Sandy Hook Kids Won't Have Died In Vain

NRA board member and bozo birthday boy Ted Nugent, who is still neither dead nor in jail, marked the one-year anniversary of the Newtown Massacre with a WND column blaming the shootings on "political correctness" and warning that unless we arm teachers, eliminate gun-free zones, and do something about mentally ill people -- as individuals, of course, not through government -- then the 26 dead at Sandy Hook Elementary will have "died for nothing."

Silly us, we thought the reason that we needed to do something about idiots with guns was that the victims of Sandy Hook already did die for nothing. They died because it's ridiculously easy for idiots with Rambo fantasies to get their hands on killing machines with high-capacity magazines, and even if some kind of meaningful reform of gun laws were to come about (a pipe dream, we know), that would not retroactively make the deaths of 20 children and 6 staff mean anything. There's no redeeming those murders, no happy symbolic transformation that can give a Ted Nugent a moral justification for shitting on those graves.

Nugent's solution, of course, is no solution at all -- the fantasy that "The only way to stop a madman with a gun is a good guy or two with guns. Nothing else will work." Except that, as a Mother Jones analysis points out, in thirty years of mass shootings, there hasn't been a single one that was ended by an armed civilian. Cops, yes, armed civilians, not so much. The gun-fondling crowd, of course, has an answer for that -- the only reason a civilian has never stopped a mass shooting is because of all those dastardly gun-free zones. If only there were a lot more guns, how much happier and safer we'd all be! We've got a banana in our ear, and there are no tigers within a thousand miles -- must be working!

Beyond the NRA boilerplate, Nugent does at least propose a "solution" to keeping guns out of the hands of dangerously unstable people that's consistent with his wacko libertarian ideals. To his credit, he at least acknowledges that "the overwhelming majority of chronically mentally ill people are not violent," which is a big improvement over NRA head Wayne Lapierre's idea for a national registry of people with mental illnesses (but not guns). Instead, Ted Nugent is all about personal responsibility:

Adam Lanza’s mother had to have been aware that her son had an affinity for mass murder. He had a giant list of previous mass murders in his room. To allow him access to guns and to teach him how to shoot was a thunderously dangerous mistake...

Had Lanza’s mother prevented her son from having access to guns and not taught him how to shoot this massacre may have been avoided. As gun owners, we have a responsibility to restrict access to guns to chronically ill family members who have displayed violent tendencies or behavior.

That's pretty inspiring, really -- no need for the government to try to prevent dangerous crazies from getting guns. Like sex ed, medical coverage, teaching about how God created everything in 6 days, that's a matter for individual families to take responsibility for.

So let's all learn the real lesson of Newtown, according to Ted Nugent, NRA Board member:

We must create conditions and laws that permit good guys to eliminate bad guys or else the good guys become victims.

It's so manly, isn't it? We all need to be ready, at any moment, to kill the bad guys. And we'll know them the instant we see them -- they're the ones with guns, but they're bad. That's pretty easy.

[ WND via MediaMatters ]