The NRA and school shootings

Several years ago, we had a school shooting near here at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. A fifteen-year-old undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic named Kip Kinkel walked into the cafeteria with a rifle and started shooting. He killed two and wounded twenty-five.

A kid named Jake Ryker was shot while disarming Kinkel. Ryker was taken to the hospital. They called his parents. His father left work and jumped in his pick-up. Instead of heading straight to the hospital, he went home to get his NRA baseball cap. He said he knew there would be reporters at the hospital and he wanted everyone to know that he still loved guns.

Loved them more than he loved his son, apparently.

You think these gun nuts care about the children in Newtown? I'm not sure they care about their own children.

A local NRA member was whining because he had to defend his gun rights every time there was a school shooting. He said that banning assault rifles wouldn't help---the killer could have used bombs and there was an attack on a school in Germany in the 1960s with a homemade flamethrower. It's an argument that could be used to defend bombs and flamethrowers just as well as guns.