FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA –When a gunman walked onto the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon and opened fire, killing 10 and leaving another dozens more wounded, it was the 45th such time a shooting has taken place on school grounds this year alone. While many in the nation are alarmed at the increasing frequency with which these school shootings are taking place, the National Rifle Association is cautioning Americans against “being trigger happy” and calling for stricter gun laws in response to this latest senseless tragedy.
“The NRA strongly advises against Americans discussing gun control at this time,” said Jack Levi, the NRA’s Assistant Deputy Press Relations Chief. Levi said that “letting emotions take over a highly emotional event” will only lead to “the further eroding of our Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms.” Mr. Levi said that “despite gun sales skyrocketing in the last few years, and despite the fact that the majority of the gun laws passed in this country have been to open up more places to legally carry a gun” that the Obama administration and the liberal media have “created a sense of urgency” when it’s not necessary.
Levi says that “it’s just too premature to look at 45 separate school shootings as an indication of a problem that needs solving.” Levi said in his estimation “a minimum of 30 or 40 more” school shootings would be where he’d set the threshold and even then, he says, “you really might be overreacting.” Levi also warned against reading too much into the fact that the Umpqua shooter was a young, self-described hard line conservative who frequented the corners of the Internet where fringe conspiracy theories and violent fantasies are encouraged. “All that stuff does is tell us what motivated him to kill those people, why does that have to matter when we’re talking about our sacred, American God given right to own any guns we want to,” Levi asked rhetorically.
“For me,” said Levi, “the number’s right around 300 or so school shootings in a single year, then it’s appropriate to talk about school shootings.” Levi said that a “knee jerk reaction to curb who can get their hands on guns” is not what the Founders would have wanted. “Clearly the people who started this country wanted every citizen to have their own, private and personal stockade,” Levi said, “and clearly it’s a wise and prudent thing to leash ourselves to the 18th century — a time when they were still treating a lot of illnesses with leeches and bloodletting.”
To Levi, the biggest threat to domestic tranquility isn’t the near ubiquity of guns in America or the Second Amendment; it’s the First Amendment. That’s because “every time one of these shootings happen the liberals start running their mouths about how we have to do something about it,” Levi said, adding a rhetorical, “since when does doing stuff solve problems?” Levi says he’d support a measure that would allow the government to temporarily suspend the First Amendment so that “no harsh words may be spoken about our almighty and God given guns.”
“The bottom line is a really simple one,” Levi said, “the Second Amendment is the most important amendment in the Constitution, even though it wasn’t important enough for them to make it the very first amendment.” Mr Levi emphasized that, “Any threat to the Second Amendment is a threat to our liberty” and that “if we can’t sleep at night, relatively assured that we can go to our caches and weapons lockers, grab our guns, and go kill government officials we didn’t vote for and the people who did vote for them, then we don’t live in America anymore, period.”
Levi said that “Americans have to just get used to the idea that in a free society, a hundred or more schools a year will get shot up, and that’s just the cost of living where liberty is the most important thing; well liberty and guns and shooting them and making stuff go BOOM!”
