The National Rifle Association's plan to fortify U.S. schools, including the posting of armed guards, to help protect them from mass shootings is drawing scorn and ridicule. The NRA's stubborn refusal to back down from its extremist positions on gun regulation are in stark contrast to comments I have heard over the past week from friends and family members who own firearms.
Here's a sample of comments made in response to the NRA plan that was unveiled Dec. 21 (Boston Herald, USA Today and Wall Street Journal reports):
"Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe." - New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
"There's no guarantee that the first person a mass killer targeted wouldn't be any armed guard, especially a suicidal killer with nothing to lose. I had hoped that the NRA was going to announce its support for meaningful gun control." - New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
"The issue is not arming school safety agents. The issue is taking dangerous assault weapons out of the hands of deranged people and criminals." - Gregory Floyd, president of the union representing New York school safety agents
"Such action would turn our schools into armed camps while enriching those who make assault weapons and the most devastating types of ammunition." - Ernest Logan, president of the New York principals union
"This is not Wyatt Earp walking down the street where you have to have a challenge. I don't have any respect for people with their own agenda and not our country's agenda." - Louisville University basketball coach Rick Pitino
"They blamed the media, they blamed video games, they blamed movies, they blamed the president, they blamed everything other than mentioning any responsibility of the proliferation and easy access to guns." - Elliot Fineman, CEO of the National Gun Victims Action Council in Chicago
"This was a missed opportunity to create another conversation at a higher level where the American people are right now." - Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chairman
"What they announced today is not a plan, but a ploy to bring more guns into our neighborhoods. I don't believe the answer to gun violence is more guns." - Boston Mayor Tom Menino
"The NRA's proposal to bring armed guards into every school in our nation is impulsive and wrongheaded. We must seek sensible approaches to school safety and to ensuring that dangerous weapons such as assault rifles are strictly regulated so that there will never be another tragedy like the one that occurred in Newtown one week ago." - Massachusetts Teachers Association
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