South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) wants everyone to know that the National Rifle Association (NRA) isn’t just composed of “old white guys,” but when a camera panned to the audience listening to her speak and showed nothing but old white guys, social media lit up with laughter and mockery.
Speaking at the 2023 NRA convention in Indianapolis on Friday, Noem remarked:
“The media would have us believe that the NRA is only made up of old white guys. And all you old white guys can be proud and raise your hands. “But there’s a lot of other people, a lot of diversity, within the NRA.
“Well let me tell you something: I may be a mom and a grandma, but I am the NRA.”
Then came the camera taking a shot of the crowd.
Noem: The media would have us believe that the NRA is only made up of old white guys.. But there are a lot of other people. A lot of diversity in the NRA… *camera switches to audience* pic.twitter.com/Tten37Yq9M
There’s white guys in hats, white guys not in hats, white guys with glasses, white guys with bifocals, white guys with tshirts, white guys with shirts that don’t fit. Tons of diversity
Indicted and failed one-term former president Donald Trump showed up at the 2023 NRA convention in Indianapolis on Friday, but he used most of his speech to air his own grievances as numerous criminal investigations continue to close in on him.
The one-term ex-POTUS began by attacking New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“What they are doing is destroying our great country. I want to congratulate you for fighting it so bravely, all of the things that have been happening to you, the racist and — ran for office on, I will get Trump. Didn’t know anything about me, running for office. I said, who is that maniac? A lot of people in the race, you get a few people to vote, very few people it takes to get in. She proclaimed I look forward to going into the office of attorney general every single day, suing him, and going home, very happy. I — I said, I hope she gets in.”
Did he move on? No, he continued with his rant aimed at AG James.
“What is fueling my soul right now, she announced, is getting Trump. She knows nothing about me. It’s not an investigation. It’s a persecution.”
Then he turned to others investigating him.
“Just like her attacks on the NRA and the witchhunts against us by the Manhattan D.A., the Marxist D.A. In Atlanta and the guy I have a watching — the guy from Washington, special prosecutor, special counsel, I call it a prosecutor, it’s better. Biden has a 1850 boxes that are unaccounted for. He had many boxes in Chinatown. Classified information, many boxes. They got them out of there, but they got caught. That’s called obstruction. They sent them up to Boston. Then it was revealed he got millions of dollars from the Chinese.”
Woe is me! And there was even more.
“But he has boxes in Chinatown, boxes all over the place. They don’t care about that, they only care about Trump. They are trying to arrest their political opposition. It’s very much like the old Soviet Union. With the elections and interference. They are interfering with the election. It’s going to be hard for them to get away with the kind of corruption they did when they had Covid because Covid made a lot of things bad for a lot of. They cheated and it will be hard.”
Trump attacks New York AG Letitia James and claims that he is being "persecuted." pic.twitter.com/JgEzbH7lVp
Boxes in Chinatown? What in the hell does that even mean? Oh, and be sure and notice that he returned to the bullshit about how he was cheated out of a second term.
If this is any indication of the speeches we can expect from Donnie in the future, he should just go ahead and concede the 2024 race right now, because he’s even more batshit crazy than he was the first time he ran.
As the country reels from yet another mass shooting — this time in Louisville, Kentucky on Monday — Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is suggesting that fully automatic weapons and “cannons” should be declared legal because when they were, mass shootings were nonexistent.
On his Firebrand podcast, Gaetz began with the right-wing’s favorite bullshit tactic whenever there’s mass deaths from gun violence: Thoughts and prayers.
“This morning, we were made aware yet again of another shooting, this time at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. We, of course want to take time to mourn the loss of innocent life, but we should not wait in acting to prevent these frequent aggressive acts from happening in the future.”
From there, the Florida Republican asserted that gun control is actually the problem, not the solution.
“Your grandparents used to be able to order mail-order automatic weapons, and when the Second Amendment was written, the American people, such as they were, could own cannons. No mass shootings back then.”
That’s simply not true, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Gaetz doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The National Firearms Act, which outlawed automatic weapons, was enacted in 1934. Why? To stop mass shootings by gangs involved in bootlegging and organized crime, as NPR has reported:
In the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. was dealing with a different kind of gun violence epidemic: a massive increase in organized crime, fueled by Prohibition.
Gangsters, like Al Capone, were making big money trafficking illegal alcohol. And a key weapon in their arsenal was the machine gun.
“Those criminals from the mob took advantage of the rise of the portable machine gun, capable of firing multiple rounds of ammunition with the single pull of a trigger,” says Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s school of law and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right to Bear Arms in America.
With increasing calls for stronger gun safety legislation being heard across the country, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said Wednesday that the Second Amendment to the Constitution is absolute and new laws can’t be enacted because “we’re not a democracy.”
Boebert’s remarks came in response to comments made by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who said at a meeting of the teacher’s union:
“Today, we renew our call for common sense gun safety legislation, including a ban on assault weapons. This is an epidemic.
“It’s an epidemic that our great nation must solve. And how many lives will be shattered before we have the courage to do what Scotland did, what Australia did, what New Zealand did, what other great democracies do? We must solve this epidemic, and that’s up to us.”
Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand all banned guns in the wake of mass shootings.
That led right-wing host Charlie Kirk to tell Boebert that what Weingarten was proposing is an appeal of the Second Amendment. Boebert agreed, noting:
“And, you know, maybe one of the things that we need to address with the Democrat party is, you played a clip from the teachers union with Randi there talking Maybe one thing we need to address is we’re not a democracy! So quit with that!
“Maybe that’s where you’re getting it wrong,. It’s saying that we are a democracy. We are a constitutional republic.”
Boebert then added this bit of dreck:
“And that is something that needs to be taught in our schools, not this woke critical race theory on how to hate our country and hate your fellow classmates and community members because of the color of their skin. Maybe teach a little honor and respect for our history and the correct history, rather than all this woke nonsense that produces the Ilhan Omars of the world.”
Of course, if Lauren had bothered to actually pay attention in the GED classes she struggled so mightily with, she’d know that the United States is a representative democracy.
At a Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing this week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) got swatted down by Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz (FL) on the issue of guns, gun safety, and the mass shooting at a school in Nashville that left six dead, including three young children.
Moskowitz began by remarking:
“There are six people that are dead in that school including three children because you guys got rid of the assault weapons ban. “Because you guys made it easy for people who don’t deserve to have weapons, who are mentally incapable of having weapons of war, being able to buy those weapons and go into schools.”
The Florida Democrat then noted the hearing itself was a joke with the GOP focusing on car theft and public urination in the District of Columbia:
“You guys want to talk about DC public schools and crime? I don’t I don’t want to burst your bubble over there, but mass murder in schools is crime.
“You want to talk about 1,300 cars being stolen, 550 people have been murdered in school. Who cares about the cars? What about the kids?”
Moskowitz continued:
“No hearing for them. 330,000 kids have experienced gun violence in this country. The number one killer of school aged children in this country. Gun violence. How do you think for the parents who have had to bury their kids who have had to decide what to put their kids clothes, but their kids when they buried them? Or kind of box they have to pick out for their child or for when they come home?”
When it was her time to speak, Greene began whining, “I was an 11th grade and Joe Biden made our school gun free school zones. One of the students in my school brought three guns to school and our entire school went on lockdown, because he was the only person with a gun. There was no good guy with a gun to protect us kids at school.”
She added:
“So, if you want to have a good talk about schools, and protecting children, we need to talk about protecting our children the same way we protect our president, the way we protect our celebrities.”
However, Congressman Moskowitz had the perfect retort to Greene’s claims:
“Did the good guys with the guns stop six people from getting murdered? No. But you know what? AR 15’s, have you ever seen what those bullets do to children? You know why you don’t hunt with an AR 15 with a deer, because there’s nothing left. And there’s nothing left as these kids when people go into school and murder them while they’re trying to read.
“You guys are worried about banning books – dead kids can’t read.”
“You guys are worried about banning books — dead kids can’t read.”
— Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) hits back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over gun safety following the Nashville school mass shooting pic.twitter.com/VdaLlsBboO
If guns were the solution to crime the way Republicans claim, wouldn’t the United States be the safest country on the planet? It isn’t, and the proliferation of guns is a big part of the problem.
