Awesome NRA Video Explains Why Shooting Should Be Taught In Schools

Here's a very edgy and forward-thinking editorial video from the NRA's Billy Johnson, explaining that we need to change the way we think about guns. After all, since guns are something that everyone in America needs, we should treat them exactly like education, public recreation, and jobs, and make them a government priority, not something government tries to suppress. It's a fascinating "what if" that sounds like something a first-year composition teacher might receive from a student who spent all night doing "bong hits" and "rapping" with a roommate at Liberty University. If America were really serious about living up to its ideals, he says, it would promote guns, and have a gun policy that's "driven by our need for guns." Now, you may think you do not need a gun, but that is because you are Not American.

Johnson, the editorial genius who brought us the video explaining that if only we'd call "mass shootings" something else, there wouldn't be any more mass shootings, starts off by asking what if our education policy were aimed at keeping kids from learning anything (at which point half his viewers shouted in unison, "COMMON CORE!!!"), or parks policy tried to keep people out of parks? He apparently hasn't been paying much attention to funding for schools or parks, but we don't think that was his actual point.

You see, Johnson explains while pointlessly animated images and snippets of his words whirl into place behind him, our government doesn't actually promote guns, which are the single most important thing in America; instead the government tries to restrict them, as if they were somehow "dangerous." Yes, you can actually hear the scare quotes. Obviously there is nothing dangerous about guns, which is why so many families "hide" loaded guns in their sock drawers for their children to find, like a Passover afikomen.

In Johnson's ideal imaginary America, the government might even subsidize gun purchases -- he doesn't quite say that the poor should get an ObamaGun, but he comes close. And how about an annual ammo allotment? Obviously, we would also require that children be taught in school to shoot,* "just like we teach them reading and writing, necessary skills" -- perhaps with tutoring for the children of liberals, and no child would advance to the next grade without being a good shot. And it "wouldn't matter if they didn't want to learn," because the NRA loves freedom -- but just as you can't be a good citizen without knowing who George Washington was, you can't be a good citizen if you can't blow away an imaginary bad guy or jackbooted federal thug.

After all, "Our Founding Fathers believed that we did need guns," which is why they wrote the second half of the Second Amendment, and just shut up about the part that the NRA never quotes.

UPDATE: YouTube video was removed, but is still on YouTubehere; happily, the good folks at Media Matters made a copy before it vanished; we have added that copy to our post. Thanks, MM4A!

[ YouTube (video taken down) / Media Matters ]

*though not to shoot in schools, one hopes