DING DONG THE WITCH IS…fired, anyway

I just got home from a long day of wrangling student registration and doing bureaucratic paperwork and not getting to play with spiders, and I was kind of dragging, and then I got the cheery news.

NRATV has been cancelled, and so has Dana Loesch!

…the NRA has officially shut down production of NRATV. (Though they may continue to air past content.) The organization has apparently felt the network and its operating company Ackerman McQueen have become too extreme and too far removed from their core values. Also, according to the New York Times, there’s some sort of legal dispute between the two, as the NRA began audits of their contractors in relation to its tax-exempt status, and accused Ackerman McQueen of refusing to comply.

And on top of all of that, NRATV kept their viewership numbers secret, but it’s now being reported that the site had a measly 49,000 unique visitors in January. And Ackerman McQueen has reportedly been receiving $40 million annually from the NRA.

So it’s no wonder that NRA is cutting ties with the advertising firm. And that includes Loesch, who was apparently an employee of Ackerman McQueen, not the NRA directly.

Now the worry is what vicious violent sewer will adopt her as their rat queen next.

It’s either part of a nefarious plan, or mental illness, or both

Police raided a home near Los Angeles and uncovered a stash of thousands of guns. They’re currently sorting through them trying to figure out why this house needed that kind of armament.

My first thought: cat ladies. There is a kind of well known obsession where individuals collect cats, they overrun their homes, the person is unable to keep up with the filth they produce, and the animals are neglected and suffer, while the person insists that they love their animals and don’t want to be parted with them, all while their home becomes an unliveable hazard. This is not to imply that having cats is a mental health issue, but compulsive and excessive hoarding might be.

Maybe there should be a recognized problem like “crazy gun hoarder syndrome”. Affects mainly older men. Leads to houses cluttered with rifles and handguns everywhere, so many that they aren’t properly maintained and constitute a danger to the resident and the neighborhood. Makes everyone wonder why they can’t control their obsessions. Needs to be dealt with with sympathy and social treatment.

What reinforces that idea are some of the comments on that video.

‘Adam & Ramona’ are clearly in the early stages of the syndrome. No, you don’t need 20 rifles and 10 handguns. You certainly are within the allowed limits of the law, but you’ve got a problem. Before you defend yourself by saying you’re a “collector”, well, that’s not an escape clause. Collect things that don’t kill people, OK? Or maybe he removes the firing pins from his historical archive of period self-defense tools, which are all neatly stored with labels in locked cabinets.

‘P G’ might have a problem, too. The police find a house packed to the rafters with murder sticks, and you’re concerned that the murder sticks might get scratched? Your priorities are kind of messed up, guy.

They don’t even have feline toxoplasmosis to blame.

Alternatively, of course, maybe the house owner will turn out to be a far-right wannabe terrorist with grand plans to take over LA with a hodge-podge of guns. That’s not good either. Or he was a petty crook running an illegal gun store to sell to people who couldn’t even pass the minimal gun checks in our law. Also bad.

There’s nothing good about any of this!

Tragedy strikes the NRA

Oh no! The NRA’s income is plummeting!

The nation’s leading gun-rights organization saw its income drop by $55 million last year, after a record-breaking 2016 in which the group and its political affiliates spent unprecedented sums to elect President Donald Trump.

The National Rifle Association of America reported $98 million in contributions in 2017, down from nearly $125 million in 2016, according to new tax records obtained by The Daily Beast. Nearly one-fifth of its contributions last year came from a single anonymous donor, who chipped in nearly $19 million to the group.

Although, to put that in perspective, their total income was $312 million, so they haven’t gone broke yet.

If you’re concerned about the future of the NRA, I like Betty Bowers’ solution:

Another shooting. Nothing will change.

More mass murder by a right-wing fanatic in Pittsburgh. This one is clearly driven by anti-semitic bigotry. We’re getting the usual excuses.

The governor of Pennsylvania says “These senseless acts of violence are not who we are as Americans.” I wish that would go away. It is who we are as Americans — we’ve got a few perpetrators and a vast mob of people who are fully supportive of allowing weapons available to any one — they’re enablers. We’re living in a violent country where the people in power want to encourage more violence.

Like our president*.

Trump says protection inside the temple would have changed things…if the Pittsburgh synagogue that was attacked by a gunman on Oct. 27 had armed security, the results would have been far better.

We will solve our problems with guns with more guns. Right.

I think one important role of the federal government is to shut down the NRA

A core function of government is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens, according to the NRA. The NRA does not make me feel safe, therefore the organization ought to be dismantled.

Especially when they’ve got loons saying nonsense like this:

Texas is asking to spend federal Department of Education grant money to buy firearms for teachers that have gone through the states school marshal program. Teachers trained to carry firearms in school, in firearms, and the state needs permission to use federal money to do that. As you can imagine, the left is melting down. Anti-gunner’s outrage that the government would soon be funding firearms to put in the hands of educators. I would argue — of all the things schools use federal grant money for, this may be the most legitimate. It falls into the core functions of the federal government, provide for the safety and security of its citizens. In fact, using federal tax dollars to buy guns for teachers is more in line, and more in the boundaries of what the federal money should be used for than even textbooks or after-school programs. Guns in the hands of good guys has a direct impact on our safety, a core function of government.

Although he does have one point: education is not one of the core rights granted in the bill of rights. That’s more of a failure of the Constitution than an excuse to shut down education, and it’s certainly not a justification for arguing that educators ought to be supplied with guns before books.