A World of Maximum Guns, Cont.

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Gawker flags this quote from Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America:


Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones. The only thing accomplished by gun free zones is to insure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun.
There is an interesting psychology at work here. Nancy Lanza, the mother of mass murderer Adam Lanza, was a gun collector who kept arms so that she might be "prepared for the worst." But Nancy Lanza's weapons did not prepare her to defend against the worst, they prepared her to be destroyed by the worst -- along with her neighbors and several small children. Pratt's answer is not to question the preparation which killed Nancy Lanza, but to duplicate it ad infinitum. 

Meanwhile Gawker alerts us to a gentleman in Indiana, who threatened to set his wife on fire, then enter the local elementary school and "kill as many people as he could." Police searching the man's apartment found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout the home -- doubtlessly assembled so that he too might be "prepared for the worst."


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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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