The National Rifle Association And The Face Of Evil

The party of Lincoln has lost its way.

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

That line — from William Shakespeare’s 17th-century tragicomedy The Tempest — should have been inscribed in blood-red letters this weekend over the entrance to the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. That’s where delegates to the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association gathered to celebrate their undying devotion to instruments of death.

They convened less than 300 miles from Ulvade, Texas, where only days earlier one of those instruments had been employed to horrific effect: nineteen fourth graders and two of their teachers were slaughtered in their classroom by an unhinged teenager wielding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The shooter, barely 18-years-old, had purchased the weapon from a gun dealer as casually — and just as legally — as one picks up a Slurpee at the local 7-eleven.

It was the twenty-seventh school shooting of 2022, and one of more than two hundred mass shootings so far this year — and the year’s not half-way done.

Yet the problem is not the guns, according to the assembled NRA brain trust in Houston (chief among them former President Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz); nor is it Americans’ unfettered access to those weapons.