At the NRA Convention, People Blame Mass Shootings on Everything but Guns

The nation has been plunged into despair and mourning. A little more than a week after the slaughter of 10 people by a white supremacist in Buffalo, a gunman killed 19 children and 2 adults in Uvalde, Texas, as police stood by in what seems a glacial and incompetent response. The tragedies renewed calls for gun control. In a national address, President Joe Biden called for a coordinated response to take on the gun lobby. Democratic legislatures have moved to pass gun control legislation at the state level.

And in Houston, the National Rifle Association still threw a party. Despite the tragedies, the NRA’s annual national convention went ahead this weekend. It was, as my colleague Inae Oh wrote, déjà-vu. After the Columbine shooting in 1999, the NRA decided to still hold its convention in Colorado.

Two messages emerged from the assembled throngs and the doting politicians in attendance, just 300 miles from Uvalde: 1) People must continues to enjoy the right to acquire any damn firearm they choose, without meddling from the state; and 2) the massacre had absolutely nothing—not a thing!—to do with the untrammeled commerce in guns. And may in fact have been a staged conspiracy meant to trigger crackdown on this inalienable (and yet recently invented) right.