This is the original quotation, as posted by Lucy Van Pelt on the Huffington Post:

Now what’s wrong with this picture?  Note that PETA is pressuring the Huffington Post to reveal the names and IP addresses of people they insist have libeled them in the comments sections beneath blogs.

That would require them to quote, accurately, the remarks said to be libelous. Don’t you think?

Examine the word “ILLEGALLY” in PETA’s version of this quotation.  Note how that word appears in the original: “LEGALLY”.

Two tiny letters make a big difference, don’t they.

This charming misquotation also appears on a “euthanasia”(sic) blog hosted by Mary Tully, probably the most persistent apologist for PETA’s pet-killing policy:

Now, why does this matter? Well, PETA is not simply doing their best to chill free speech in a public forum — an appalling violation of the anti-SLAPP laws — but they are doing it on the basis of false information.

 ***

(For what it’s worth, he’s just been found guilty of libel, and is currently in contempt of court, for — amongst other things — stalking. But I wish him all the best in his lawsuit.)

The slippery slope has in fact never been tipped in the direction that the gun lobby would like you to believe. When gun fanatics lose the tiniest bit of ground in the argument over Second Amendment rights, they never find themselves sliding any further. Ever. No weapons ban has ever snowballed into anything remotely like the “gun grabbing” that the NRA predicts with calculated dread. Quite the opposite.

It is worth looking at the most rigorous attempt to implement a series of gun reforms in the United States. That would be the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. If anything should have set gun laws into that catastrophic slide towards mass prohibition, it would have been this.

The NRA of course announced to its members with great lamentation that this was now guaranteed to happen. When Bill Clinton proposed the ban, he met with full-on war, and when he succeeded in passing the ban, he met with full-on vengeance.

The fight to achieve the assault weapons ban was clever, even if it provided the country with poorly-crafted legislation:

Rahm Emanuel, the hard-charging White House senior adviser, engineered the main strategy: shove provisions favored by conservatives (more death penalty and prisons) and those fancied by liberals (gun control and rehabilitation programs) into a single package, and the $25 billion-plus bill would have a shot of success. Meanwhile, Clinton draped himself in cops. “At every event he had touting the bill and the assault weapons ban, he had at least 40 cops,” a former Clinton Justice Department official recalls. “And he was pro-death penalty.”

The ban itself was largely impotent, because it was riddled with loopholes. Gun zealots now use this to argue that weapons bans simply do not work, but that is not the lesson at all, as Australia discovered: bans work only if they are comprehensive and intelligent.

Clinton spent much of his political capital on this flawed legislation — a law that had no appreciable affect upon the average gun owner — and still the National Rifle Association howled. They’d hardly lost their vise-grip on the nation: the Federal Assault Weapons Ban “passed by a two-vote margin in the Democrat-controlled House.” Still, the NRA behaved as if America had turned its back on the Second Amendment and shoved patriots onto a polished and greased slide. Soon guns would be confiscated by jackbooted feds with soul-stealing warrants.

Passing the ban gave the NRA what they needed to create mass hysteria among their members and unprecedented pressure upon legislators. The gun lobby ginned up Republicans with just this sort of rhetoric, leading to a monumental GOP victory in the midterms: Republicans “gained 54 seats and control of the House for the first time in 40 years.”

Clinton blamed the midterm debacle on this hard-won but ultimately weak ban. The Democrats have been gun-shy ever since. And we should not sugarcoat this: they do have much to fear. If Congress has the backbone to pass meaningful legislation after Sandy Hook, then the next federal election is going to be a precarious business.

In fact, the only way to stave off a similar debacle will be a strategy along the lines of the one that I have proposed here, or the very similar one that Gabby Giffords is promoting: an equal and opposite counter-lobby, funded to the same obscene degree as the NRA, and prepared to support the campaign of any candidate with the courage to stand up to the gun lobby.

The most remarkable result of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, however, was not Democratic apprehension: it was the terror that seized gun zealots, and that holds them captive even now.

These people are spooked by any mention of a ban. Ever since I began writing this series, I’ve been transformed into a looming sasquatch: the worst kind of hunched and hairy bogeyman. Consider my favorite tweet from a gun lover to his brethren: “Agree that assault weapons ban does nothing, disagree with policy solution. Fear him.”

Fear me? These people have semiautomatics, and I don’t own so much as a Super Soaker.

I know: the pen is mightier than the sword. Still, I doubt that even my manly, rugged iPad could stop a determined bullet.

I’m not even a very credible gun grabber. I have championed the Australian Model, which has allowed responsible gun owners in Oz to keep their weapons, and has not — sorry — caused anyone’s gun rights to slide anywhere. It is well-written legislation that does precisely what it was designed to do; it has not grown into anything more than this, and it does not show any signs of doing so.

I’m just not a very scary guy, but because I’ve proposed sensible laws, I inspire this quasi-biblical tweet: an exhortation to fear me. It really is worse than irrational. Physician, fear thyself — and stop projecting. You might as well fear the first-graders slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Ah, but these people do fear those six- and seven-year-olds. Gun partisans do not mourn these children: they worry that the massacre might bring back the terrifying, tyrannical days of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

The 1994 ban has indeed generated chronic and truly useful neurosis, which has been exploited with characteristic skill by the NRA. All of this despite the comical shoddiness of the legislation.

While the term “assault weapons” dates back at least to 1943, the Clinton-era ban refined this term to produce an almost useless definition: the law determined that scary-looking guns were assault weapons. “Anti-gun people and organizations used the term to describe anything that even remotely looked like a military-style weapon. Senator Howard Metzenbaum even described them as ‘ominous.’”

Ponder this. You’re a gun manufacturer, and you’ve been told by legislators that your uglier weapons — literally, ugly to look at — are now illegal. What do you do? The answer is obvious: make the same weapons, but give them a makeover.

After the ban, and this badly-written definition, guns could in fact be given a nice face-lift in a way that rendered them legal, but hardly affected them functionally. A gun was permitted to have only one of the following features, for instance: “an adjustable stock, pistol grip, bayonet mount, grenade launcher, or a flash suppressor.” Criminals, believe me, were perfectly happy to have semiautomatics without grenade launchers. They did not even use bayonets all that often.

Flash suppressors are the visual equivalent of a silencer, however, and are indeed useful if you are involved in a midnight murder that requires a degree of cover: sparks might tip off the neighbors. So you would have to do without an adjustable stock or a pistol grip if you required one of those. Hey, you’d live. (Your victim, not so much.)

Hence the ban resulted in all sorts of guns that were cosmetically a bit less ominous, and in essence pretty much the same. Many of these were named for the ban, to remind gun owners just how much they were suffering.

The NRA wept and wailed. Take away our bayonet mounts, and the next thing you’ll want are shotguns, handguns, slingshots.

None of this happened. The ban was not extended to cover any further weapons.

The legislation did limit the size of magazines to 10 rounds, a reasonable provision, but finally not that helpful.

In fact, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was of such minimal use — and caused so much grief to legislators involved — that politicians a few years later did not want to go anywhere near it.

The 1994 law had a “sunset clause,” meaning that it had to be renewed in 2004 or it would evaporate, and 2004 just happened to be four years into the trigger-happy Bush administration, and three years after 9/11. Every citizen was nervous about perceived national weakness, and every politician was nervous about the massive political hit taken by the Democrats after the ban was passed. Hence there was no impetus on either side of the aisle to extend the legislation, and the 1994 law died a quiet and ignominious death.

So much for the slippery slope.

There is no other way to interpret this: our inclined plane is tilted in precisely the opposite direction from the one the NRA would have you believe. The almost impossible business is climbing up the slope towards gun control.

This remains, however, an extremely good metaphor. Ever tried to ascend an iced hill? You get one or two steps up, and then you have to hold your breath and balance — absolutely still — in order to maintain the little bit of ground you’ve achieved. There is no question of going any further. Simply staying where you are requires immense concentration.

It is natural at this point to give up. You sure ain’t going anywhere, so what’s the purpose of clinging to your sorry accomplishment? And so it goes: we slide back down the slope into a silly, maximalist reading of the Second Amendment.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is captured almost perfectly by this simile. No doubt the NRA took note of this and studied it, before flipping it to produce their perfect lie: oh, those slopes are horribly slippery, and they tilt disastrously towards gun grabbing and tyranny.

Don’t fool yourself: the gun lobby is willing to give up precisely nothing. They do not negotiate. This disingenuous conceit — this slippery fiction — allows them to justify the most extreme form of intransigence. Note how it works: “If we give up even a nanometer of gun rights, that’s it: we’re on an infernal toboggan, sliding into that hell where all guns are banned. Hence? We give them nada.”

It is an apparently reasonable argument, and it serves to crank up the jittery will of paranoid extremists.

The NRA feeds its members on a steady diet of fear. Responsible gun owners don’t swallow this: most of them have long favored practical gun control; they are important allies in this battle. Yes, many belong to the NRA, but they do not buy into the gun-grabber paranoia. The NRA plays, therefore, to the members that do: the armed and timid. If you can manipulate these people so that they always feel cornered, then they will always behave like cornered rats. That is how you make the terrified truly dangerous.

Hence, the NRA has good reason to favor this slippery metaphor. It is elegant propaganda: simple, scary and targeted: nobody wants to occupy dangerously tilted terrain, especially if they’re already off-kilter. Never mind that it is sane, decent citizens who stand on this carefully snake-oiled slope, and who slide — every single time — into the hell that is Columbine, and Virginia Tech, and Aurora, and Sandy Hook.

Freedom means that children are imprisoned so that gun-lovers can exercise their constitutional rights? Oh, but this isn’t a prison. Here, the jailers are allied with the kids. You want hard men carrying semiautomatics to keep out the bad guys. Well, let’s go all the way, shall we, as we design these not-prisons.

Looks as if this exercise in happy-go-lucky childhood — suggested by those adults at the National Rifle Association — may well be attracting some serious funds: there’s talk of putting aside $50 million. Still, this will be tax-payers’ money, so let’s be fiscally responsible. How about barbed wire? Barbed wire is cheap, and bad guys have a notoriously difficult time climbing over barbed wire.

What about guard towers? I ask you, which is safer: having armed goons wandering the halls, or trained snipers in towers? The thing about guard towers is that you can take out the bad guys before they get anywhere near the school. And let’s keep an eye on the budget here: if you put a tower at each corner of the school, and have a swath of no man’s land surrounding the structure — a sort of dry moat — then you can minimize the manpower required to keep children free and happy.

Searchlights! Searchlights are affordable, and night classes can be dangerous.

And what you really want is the very finest high-tech surveillance equipment. Ah, childhood. Tom and Huck. Kick the can. Infrared.

You see, the best way to prove the totalitarian stupidity of the NRA’s proposal is to take it seriously. This is an old and venerable technique: the reductio ad absurdum. You simply accept the premises of an argument, at face value, and see where they take you. Once you’ve demonstrated that this trail of reasoning leads — by necessity — to an unacceptable (generally idiotic) conclusion, then you know that at least one of those premises is rotten.

Here’s the problem, however. Once you arrive at the unacceptable (generally idiotic) conclusion, you have to recognize that this is where you’re standing: somewhere unacceptable. You have to acknowledge that — simply by standing there, stroking your chin seriously — you’re an idiot.

Otherwise the reductio doesn’t work. You come up with a situation like this: well-meaning, generally thoughtful politicians actually proposing — with straight faces — that we put $50 million towards transforming schools into gulags.

And why? So that the grownups can be free to stockpile weapons against tyranny. I mean, good lord, you don’t want tyrants. So let’s have our children spend their best, most carefree years under the watchful eyes of crack mercenaries.

We were in the process of some kind of argument, I seem to remember. Something about arriving at an absurdity, and deciding that — as a result of this — there’s something desperately wrong with the reasoning that brought us there?

Now, explain to me how this is not just a little bit absurd. To preserve freedom in America, we’ll place children in a learning environment that would have been considered oppressive under Stalin. We’ll lock them in buildings that are — I guarantee it — more heavily guarded then any kindergarten in North Korea.

Are we out of our collective mind?

Fifty. Million. Dollars. Towards ensuring that, between the ages of six and sixteen, American citizens live in a dystopian hell. All in the name of freedom.

The NRA would have this so that, once you emerge from that hell, you’re free. And let’s face it: you are. You can own as many guns as you want. Can’t say that about anywhere else in the free world, can you? You can buy all of these guns without being hassled: no intrusive background checks; no edgy waiting period. Anywhere else have this kind of freedom? I don’t think so.

Hence, when you escort your children from the house to the school, you can guarantee them genuine safety. An armed escort. Home is safe (because there are guns); school is safe (because there are guns); and should anything bad happen between these two armed camps, you have mil-spec ordnance to annihilate this threat to your children’s freedom.

Nowhere else in the world will children be so rigorously protected from tyranny.

The Obama administration is, of course, famed for going the distance when it comes to compromise. (The distance being precisely the thing you don’t want to go.) And so we read this paragraph, in an actual news story:

The school safety initiative would make federal dollars available to schools that want to hire police officers and install surveillance equipment, although it is not nearly as far-ranging as the National Rifle Association’s proposal for armed guards in every U.S. school.
The idea is gaining currency among some Democratic lawmakers, who see it as a potential area of common ground with Republicans who otherwise oppose stricter restrictions on firearms. Liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said she presented the plan to Vice President Joe Biden, and that he was “very, very interested” and may include it in the policy recommendations he makes to President Barack Obama.

Let’s do a close reading. This idea is “gaining currency.” With sane people.

Why? Because it’s a “potential area of common ground.” Ah! A compromise! Senator Barbara Boxer (a sober, liberal woman) presented this lunacy to Joe Biden (not generally considered a drooling whackjob) and the Vice President is “very, very interested.”

Interested in what?

Am I missing something? Is there an idea here? The NRA has suggested something cynical, tyrannical, utterly worthless and unparalleled in stupidity — and this fascinates you? Perhaps the interesting part is that you’re only going to put $50 million towards this thuggery, when it could be $100 million. “It is not nearly as far-ranging as the National Rifle Association’s proposal for armed guards in every U.S. school.” We’ll, that’s win-win, isn’t it.

In return for this, the NRA is willing to not consider gun controls of any sort. Seems fair to me.

At least we’re not talking about barbed wire, right? Or guard towers. Or surveillance equipment. Or… hang on. Sometimes you really do have to read things closely, to be sure that you’re not hallucinating.

“The school safety initiative would make federal dollars available to schools that want to hire police officers and install surveillance equipment.”

When Joe Biden eagerly presents these “policy recommendations” to President Obama, all I ask — all I beg for — is one thing. It doesn’t have to be the president himself. It can be a senator, a congressman, some minor functionary, a powerless aide — I don’t care. But will somebody please have the common decency to laugh convulsively until tears ruin his tie and he has to be carried helpless from the room?

And now I do.

Equally obvious to me was the right person to head up such an endeavor: Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, who has been one of the rare voices here both courageous and persistent. I’ve been trying to get my proposal onto his desk for weeks, with spectacular unsuccess.

Of course, there is an even more obvious candidate. She has in fact just proposed precisely the same idea, and I didn’t even have to harass her personal assistant.

Her name is Gabrielle Giffords.

It gets better. Hizzoner may not return my calls, but I assure you he picks up the phone when the former congresswoman from Arizona calls. And Gabby Giffords called.

If I sound a touch giddy, it’s because this is just fabulous news: frankly, the only good news we’ve had here since the massacre. I’m sick of writing bitter essays that seem to be read — judging from the comments — mostly by suspicious gun zealots.

I can’t imagine a better team. Giffords will be heading up the organization with her husband, Mark E. Kelly, a formidable figure in his own right. The part that Mayor Bloomberg will play has yet to be detailed. It’s sufficient to know that he’s on board.

Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly announced their project in an op-ed in USA Today.

The proposal is a political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions. The plan is to “raise funds necessary to balance the influence of the gun lobby.” That influence is direct, and ugly: If a candidate displays a tendency towards voting responsibly on gun control, the NRA will put a huge chunk of cash into a hand-picked opponent. Only by matching those cynical dollars will decent candidates stand a proper chance. If the following sounds familiar, it’s because Gabrielle Giffords has been reading my mind:

Until now, the gun lobby’s political contributions, advertising and lobbying have dwarfed spending from anti-gun violence groups. No longer. With Americans for Responsible Solutions engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and funding political activity nationwide, legislators will no longer have reason to fear the gun lobby.

I intend to take full and fulsome credit for all of this, needless to say. (Feel free to respond with snorting derision. My girlfriend already has.)

On a more serious celebratory note: This is strategically miraculous. Let’s examine the collective bona fides here.

Gabrielle Giffords is, of course, the former representative from Arizona who survived an assassination attempt, on January 8 2011, that left six people dead. She can hardly be dismissed as a “gun grabber” — the pejorative term du jour for people opposed to the NRA. This is a slur to be borne with pride (I’ve taken to signing my name “DAC, GG”) but it does not describe Giffords. She’s not even opposed to the NRA itself — simply to “special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe.”

Tell me that a sane gun owner can truly find this statement scary:

Forget the boogeyman of big, bad government coming to dispossess you of your firearms. As a Western woman and a Persian Gulf War combat veteran who have exercised our Second Amendment rights, we don’t want to take away your guns any more than we want to give up the two guns we have locked in a safe at home. What we do want is what the majority of NRA members and other Americans want: responsible changes in our laws to require responsible gun ownership and reduce gun violence.

Yes, efforts to paint Gabby Giffords as a rabid leftwing enemy of the Constitution won’t get far. She was a member of the Blue Dog coalition, the fiscally conservative bloc in the Democratic Party. Before that, she considered herself a Republican. While she opposed the draconian immigration law that recently disgraced Arizona — the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” – her former districtin southeast Arizona shares a border with Mexico, and she is famously tough with regard to border security.

On social issues Giffords has tended towards centrism, but even here she will be difficult to dismiss, as she was particularly distinguished in an area disingenuously endorsed by the NRA: They’ve called for reforms in mental health care, and Gabby Giffords “was named the Legislator of the Year in 2004 by the Mental Health Association of Arizona.”

Her partner in this political action committee is her husband, Mark Kelly, who is even more difficult to shrug off as a foaming leftwing enemy of the state. I mean, good luck with that: Kelly “made two deployments to the Persian Gulf on the aircraft carrier USS Midway, flying 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm.”

Compare and contrast with the martial record of Wayne LaPierre, the butcher-than-thou CEO of the NRA, who — when it came time to serve in Vietnam — “apparently pulled lottery #97 in 1969 as a campus radical at SUNY-Albany, but weaseled out by getting a family doctor to claim he had a nervous disorder.”

Unlike the not-so-well-regulated militia who hoard semiautomatics in the attic, Mark Kelly was issued his weaponry by a more credible outfit than Walmart: He is on active duty in the US Navy, with the rank of Captain.

Just for the hell of it, let’s list his awards, all of which tend to disqualify him as a Gun Grabber:

Defense Superior Service Medal (with one bronze oak leaf cluster); Distinguished Flying Cross; Air Medal (with valor device and three bronze service stars); Navy Commendation Medal (with valor device and one bronze service star); Navy Achievement Medal; Southwest Asia Service Medal (with one bronze service star); Navy Expeditionary Medal; National Defense Service Medal (with one bronze service star); Navy Unit Commendation (with one bronze service star); Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (with one bronze service star); Overseas Service Ribbon; Kuwait Liberation Medal (Saudi Arabia); Kuwait Liberation Medal (Kuwait); NASA Exceptional Service Medal; NASA Space Flight Medal (with three bronze service stars).

Did I mention that he’s an astronaut? “Kelly traveled over 4.8 million miles and orbited the earth 186 times over 11 days and 19+ hours.” Slightly more impressive than sitting wild-eyed in a personal suburban bunker, terrified that the New World Order will descend in black helicopters to snatch your polished collection of AR-15s.

Filling out the team, in a capacity to be determined, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This man has also put in quality time as a Republican: Before becoming an independent in 2007, Bloomberg was twice elected mayor of New York City under the banner of the Party of Lincoln and Giuliani.

Mayor Bloomberg also doesn’t really cut it as a welfare-sucking commie: he’s the 11th-wealthiest man in the United States, and 20th in the world.

That’s why the gun lovers won’t be able to dismiss Gotham’s mayor. Whereas this is why the gun grabbers (that would be me, GG), love the guy: immediately after the Newtown massacre, Bloomberg held a press conference, where he stated, “If this moment passes into memory without action from Washington, it will be a stain upon our nation’s commitment to protecting the innocent, including our children.”

How many people didn’t say that.

Moreover, he has singlehandedly demonstrated that the NRA can indeed be conquered in the manner proposed: by doing precisely what LaPierre’s militia does, with comparable funding, and — here’s the crucial difference — principles.

As I’ve already reported, Bloomberg’s personal super PAC, Independence America, contributed $2.7 million to the campaign of Gloria Negrete McLeod in California’s 35th district — as a result of which she surged from a nearly hopeless position to crush Rep. Joe Baca, a Democrat blessed by the NRA with a despicable A rating.

Let’s calculate the appropriate amount for an ordinary American citizen to pledge to an Anti-NRA. I took a stab at it once before, but let’s make a more rigorous effort. We’ll call this the Walmart Equation.

A Bushmaster Patrolman’s Carbine M4A3 Rifle, 5.56 NATO — a variant of the AR-15 assault rifle, and perhaps the precise weapon used by Adam Lanza to slaughter 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School — is $850 at Walmart. Okay, it was that amount, before Walmart pulled it from the shelves after the massacre. Walmart shoppers recommend this weapon highly: it garners a 4.9 out of 5 rating from satisfied customers. In fact, Walmart has succeeded in making the AR-15 the “most popular assault weapon in America.”

So, that’s perhaps what you’d like to send to Gabby Giffords’ new organization: $850. Seems fair to spend as much on the safety of your children as a patriot spends on his gun.

Some killers buy cheaper weapons, it’s true. If you visit stormfront.com, you’ll find the following comment: “Ya, I don’t like WalMart either but if you are in need of a quality AR for less than $600….that would be the only place of which I am aware.”

So that’s perhaps an appropriate amount: $600. (Stormfront is the White Pride website. Referring to them here is a cheap shot. Then again, maybe not.)

I consider this the deluxe package for your average citizen. If your personal wealth is in the Bloomberg stratum, multiply by one thousand. If you’re an ordinary millionaire, multiply by ten.

Some of us don’t have that kind of discretionary cash, which is fine. The Walmart Equation can help you make an appropriate decision here as well.

Along with assault rifles, a variety of baby cribs are available at Walmart. The “DaVinci Reagan Three Piece Convertible Crib Nursery Set with Toddler Rail in Cherry” is, unfortunately, about the same price as a cheap semiautomatic. That’s okay, however. You have options.

The “Room Magic Boys Like Trucks Crib / Toddler Bed in Chocolate” is $465. If you’re feeling flush, and that’s the amount of money you can imagine spending on your toddler’s bed, then that’s a judicious amount to send to Gabrielle Giffords’ new gun-control lobby. Cribs too are designed specifically to protect children.

Again, that’s a hefty sum, and not everyone spends that sort of money on a crib. It seems that the least expensive is the “Dream On Me - Classic 2-in-1 Convertible Crib.” Ninety-nine dollars, which is something even a novelist can afford: I’ll be sending that much. And I don’t even have kids.

What’s the bare minimum? What’s the least amount that a responsible parent should donate to fund a plan to stand up to an organization determined to make the nation less safe for your children?

Here we’ll deviate from the Walmart Equation.

Consider that an annual membership in the NRA is $35. Lots of people with very little cash in the cookie jar see fit to put that amount towards their favorite vicious organization: a gun lobby opposed to even the most elementary background checks. (The voices in your head tell you that Honey Boo Boo is a Manchurian Candidate? How interesting. Have an assault rifle.)

Unless you’re truly broke — and if you are, I sympathize — I would say that this is a sensible amount. If every responsible citizen in America were to send in $35, then perhaps — just maybe — we could match the amount that the NRA spends on getting their faithful lackeys elected. The New York Times reminds us that the NRA has “millions of members around the country and virtually unmatched ferocity in advancing its political and legislative interests.”

Oh, and their annual budget is $300 million.

Then what have you done?

Yes, I’m asking this ugly question in all sincerity. We know what they’ve done to insure the safety of their guns in the wake of the Newtown massacre. I’ll provide details in a moment, although I’m sure you already have some sense of this: Members of the NRA demonstrate their concern in the same way after every mass shooting, whether the victims are first-graders or teens or adults. They care, I assure you.

So what have you done to match their efforts, since December 14?

List the precise steps that you have taken, personally, as a parent, to make sure that your own children will not be gunned down in the classroom. It’s been almost three weeks since twenty children, aged six and seven, were slaughtered in a town considered one of the safest in America, judging by its gun laws (which are utterly worthless, clearly, but without peer in the nation).

If you’re not insulted by this article yet, then you’re not reading closely.

Twenty days have passed. You could have spent at least, say, half an hour during each of them, following up on numerous proposals discussed immediately following the massacre. That’s less time than it takes to make dinner for your children.

If you have indeed put a great deal of time into addressing this monstrous situation, then I apologize. This is not directed at you. The rest of you, however — and I can prove that you are legion — should perhaps ask yourselves this: What exactly is the point of living in one of the greatest nations in history — arguably the most free — if you can’t personally do a damn thing to keep your family safe from thugs with semi-automatics?

Are you proud of your Constitution? Why? Because you genuinely believe it was written to protect assault rifles, not children?

I can point to a graph that demonstrates how tired you have become of this issue, relative to citizens who believe that the Constitution was written for them, not you. Dylan Byers at Politico has published a post entitled, “‘Gun control’ doesn’t survive Christmas”. In it, he has graphed the “number of mentions of the term ‘gun control’ in the news, according to Nexis”. I urge you to examine this visual argument, and ask yourself whether it accords with your own passion here.

This chart tells us that you (or perhaps not you, but everyone else you know?) expressed your deepest outrage around December 19th. That was when you decided that you were mad as hell, and weren’t going to take it any more. By December 22nd you were, at best, a bit put out. On December 25th, sure — you had another Child to think about, so it’s natural that you’d put aside your concern for the twenty massacred children at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (If it were Good Friday, you’d perhaps have been more philosophical.)

By January 2nd you were officially bored by the whole business.

Now, what have they done?

Well, this news report from six days ago has not been substantiated — it is based on an anonymous source — but tell me honestly that you don’t believe it. I expect that you, like me, would be amazed if it weren’t true:

(Fox News reporter James Rosen) tweeted that a source told him that new membership for the NRA has surged to “roughly 8,000 new registrations” per day since the Newtown massacre. Later, Rosen tweeted the source claims the organization has received a surge in both individual contributions and average donation amounts.

The unnamed source was well-placed to know this: He was “within the National Rifle Association”. (I assume it was a “he”. Don’t you?)

Or perhaps you believe that the gun lust peaked at approximately the same time as parents’ concern for their children: on December 19th. That they, like you, have forgotten about this issue. If you believe this (and you don’t), I suggest you read the comments beneath yesterday’s piece on Politico. Typical are the following excerpts:

I think people figured out how the media likes to blow up these relatively rare shootings to bolster their ratings and web traffic. Passing knee-jerk legislation in the heat of the moment has never been a good idea.

To which a reader responds, “I couldn’t agree more.”

Someone else offers:

HAHA…deal with it Politico. You’re not going to extinguish our rights so easily. In fact, if gun sales are any measure, y’all are screwed. Just picked up another “assault rifle” the other day! The weird thing is it just sits there. It hasn’t killed anyone, or even threatened me yet.

Oh, there are bleats and protestations from parent-like people here and there in the comments, but nothing comes close to the absolute conviction displayed in the arrogance of that last comment.

And, crucially, nothing suggests that the mass of people who care about their children has taken action that corresponds in any way to the energy and symbolism of what this man has done. He took the initiative. He went out and purchased an assault rifle after the massacre of twenty children. And what did you do?

Of course, it was easy for him to take action: All he had to do is wander into a Walmart (where the weapon used by Adam Lanza to gun down those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School has long been available, along with cribs and car seats and strollers). Whereas you would have had to do something out of the ordinary.

It doesn’t bother you that he puts “assault rifle” in quotation marks, to suggest that real men would describe Lanza’s weapon as something less? Isn’t it a touch annoying that he did not have to go out of his way to do what he likes to do — purchase weaponry — whereas you’d be required not only to disturb your routine, but to change your life a bit and wrestle with new ideas?

Those new ideas are out there, by the way. In fact, all you really have to do is choose one, and put some effort into it.

One friend, for instance, urged me to support the “One Million Child March“. This is a proposal to take a million children to Washington, in order to put a face on this concern, the way that India has responded publicly to the gang rape in New Delhi.

It’s worth looking at the situation in India, by the way. The vicious homicidal rape in New Delhi was two days after the Newtown massacre. They’ve had two fewer days to accomplish something, and what they’ve accomplished makes the American effort look, frankly, a bit underwhelming. The word “pathetic” comes to mind.

Don’t fool yourself: Social mores repressing women in India are at least as intransigent as the American fetish for a certain special interpretation of the Second Amendment. The right to rape women is in fact legally enshrined in that country, as long as you restrict your activities to conflict zones: Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, has pointed out that the “Armed Forces Special Powers Act” allows soldiers to rape women with impunity. Rape is protected in India the way that guns are in America, which is to say not simply by laws, but by legislators:

In the 2009 parliamentary elections, India’s political parties fielded 6 candidates charged with rape while 34 candidates were awaiting trial for crimes against women. In the state assemblies, 42 members had rape or associated charges against them at the time of their election. In all, according to a recent report published by the Association for Democratic Reforms, India has over 300 such politicians in power.

That is what women are up against in India. They face obstacles no less daunting than an odious gun lobby and an obsolete clause in the American Constitution. And yet — I’ll put money on this — after these escalating protests, laws are going to be enforced, and laws are going to change. I guarantee it won’t be as easy to rape women to death with rusted iron bars. Not in India.

Yes, something is going to happen in India, as opposed to the nothing that is going to happen in America.

Note that I do not intend to equate legal gun owners to rapists. The comparison is child slaughter to rape; the equation is the cultural conditions that enable both.

I have proposed my own rather obvious solution: that a national anti-gun lobby be founded to match the NRA, dollar for dollar, tactic for tactic, so that they can no longer subvert the electoral process. It would model itself precisely on the NRA: It would emulate their every gesture. This would involve parents — the ones who care about their children — donating at least as much to such an organization as members of the NRA do to their cherished lobby. An annual membership in the NRA costs $35. You wouldn’t kick in thirty-five bucks to battle this repulsive organization?

That unnamed source within the NRA suggested that individual contributions and donations may have exceeded mere membership fees since the massacre.

So, let’s see: You might be called upon to offer a bit more than $35 to the national lobby I’ve proposed. A quick unscientific examination of Walmart’s online catalog reveals that a good car seat for a toddler is a bit over a hundred dollars. Would you be willing to contribute the price of, say, a “Safety 1st Convertible Car Seat”? The “Alpha Omega Elite Caroline” model, which appears something of a bargain at $112.99?

Good strollers — the fashionable models, vaguely high-tech, which seem all the rage these days — are more in the line of $150. This one seems nice: the “Go-Go Babyz Urban Advantage Stroller” in “Vista Blue”. $159.99, and you can order it online.

Would you be willing to pony up an amount in the range of what you’d pay for a Go-Go Babyz stroller, to ensure that your child, when he or she emerges from the toddler stage, doesn’t get gunned down in first grade?

It’s a simple concept: a lobbying group that spends just as much money electing anti-gun candidates as the NRA does on their own chosen representatives. Organizations a bit like what I’m suggesting already exist: The Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence is the best-known. In 2012, their PAC (Political Action Committee) contributed $3018 to federal candidates.

The National Rifle Association’s PAC showed greater largesse in this department. In 2012 they spent a total of $10,765,834 on general elections. Their affiliate, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (501c)spent $7,448,013 on federal elections. The National Rifle Association (501c) spent $682,595 on communications related to federal elections.

The NRA’s budget is $300 million. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s budget (2010) was $3 million.

Do I have to put this in further perspective? The National Rifle Association, according to a Fortune survey of lobbies in 1999, was “considered the most influential by lawmakers and congressional staffers — the capital insiders closest to the lobbying action”. When other groups were added to the survey — trade association executives, other lobbyists — the NRA tied for second, after the Association of Retired Persons (AARP). This survey’s a bit old, but disturbingly pertinent: The NRA achieved this rank, despite it being “the worst year in memory for mass shootings”. Nineteen ninety-nine, when this survey was taken, was the year of the Columbine massacre.

So, yes, there’s some call for the lobby I have in mind. In fact, let’s be blunt: Without an organization of this nature, gun-control advocates have no hope. None. Parents who wish their children free from the threat of guns will lose. Just as they have always lost.

Women in India — who rightly if bitterly call themselves second-class citizens — will accomplish more than parents opposed to guns in America — who for some reason never refer to themselves that way.

Oh hell, what do I know. I don’t even have children. Perhaps I do after all misunderstand the bond between parent and child. I’m just a writer, trying hard to be all edgy and ironic, whereas you haveresponsibilities here. How can I possibly comprehend what the serious business of parenting is all about? I should go mind my own less-pressing business.

And yet I won’t. I’ve churned out some fifteen thousand irritating words since the massacre. I’ve called in personal favors in an attempt to get my proposal onto the desk of Mayor Bloomberg in New York (one of the few people in this situation with demonstrated backbone). This attempt has been miserably unsuccessful, and will almost certainly remain so: I’m thousands of miles from Manhattan, and even when I lived there I didn’t pal around with Hizzoner.

Arguably, I don’t even have the right to say what I’m saying here. America in its generosity has honored me with a green card, but I’m not a citizen. I happen to be deeply in awe of the nation and all that it stands for, but critics will have a point: What right to I have to care about six- and seven-year-olds in a small New England town?

Some critics have already suggested that I am an “elitist”. This constitutes elitism, apparently: caring more about other people’s children than gun-lovers care about their hobby. I’m a soft and citified member of the chattering classes; I don’t know what it’s like out there in the world where guns matter.

Call me out of touch, but even when I lolled half-asleep in the shallows of Manhattan, I always had the sense that parents in every state in the Union cared equally about their children. I still believe this.

While we’re reading comments from irrelevant writers who have no business commenting on the present situation, I suppose it’s time to dig up the customary passage from that Irish poet. I’ve said before that I’m waiting for the day that I can mothball this Yeats quotation forever. That Day, I’m afraid, is not likely to come this side of the Judgment.

Following the Newtown massacre, it’s appropriate to quote more than the usual two lines, which (although profound) have been heard too often, and are in danger of gliding by unnoticed like a cliché:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Try this out, for instance, as a thought experiment. The health authorities approach their local survivalist — who lives in a modest bunker trimmed with barbed wire and stuffed with semiautomatics — and they propose to examine him for symptoms of clinical paranoia.

Now, let’s assume that these health officials escape alive. Will the NRA get behind their efforts to treat this man, who — according to any acceptable professional diagnostic — is mentally ill?

His large and bristling collection of devastating weaponry might itself be taken as evidence of looming psychosis, but is the NRA really going to argue that it’s not healthy for one person to own that many assault rifles?

The gun lobby is not only uninterested in mental health care, but I assure you: they can be counted on to resist any real efforts to improve it.

A sincere proposal for solving the gun crisis by concentrating on mental health would include a provision of this sort: that we check briefly into the background of a gun buyer, to see whether he or she has ever been ticketed for standing naked on the roof and screaming at black helicopters. Or expelled from Disneyworld for setting fires. That kind of thing. But here, you see, medical concerns infringe upon the right to bear arms. (Yes, that sounds a touch ridiculous, but I assure you that we’ll encounter that argument, loudly and immediately).

Oh, and who is going to pay for the improved medical infrastructure required to improve psychiatric services? The state? That would require something in the way of taxation. More: it would require an ideological bent congenial to subsidized medical treatment. Members of the NRA have not proven overwhelmingly friendly to Obamacare, and are not — generally speaking — cheerleaders for new and higher taxes.

Should we perhaps tax guns and ammunition to pay for collective mental health care? Try floating that concept in a casual conversation at a gun show.

The gutting of America’s mental health system was accomplished, unsurprisingly, by a man remembered fondly by Wayne LaPierre’s constituency: Ronald Reagan. The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, prepared at the behest of Jimmy Carter, was not unflawed. Nevertheless:

The act was considered a landmark in mental health care policy. The key to the proposals included an increase in funding for Community Mental Health Centers and continued federal government support for such programs. But this ran counter to the financial goals of the Reagan administration…. So, the law signed by President Carter was rescinded by Ronald Reagan on August 13, 1981.

Ronald Reagan, unlike Wayne LaPierre, was honest and consistent here. The goal was to reduce federal spending and trim social programs, and an effective overhaul of the mental health system is a fantastically expensive proposition.

The mentally ill, you see, are not a small fraction of society. The NIMH provides sobering statistics: In any given year, “about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 … suffer from a serious mental illness.” If you want to include minor mental disorders, we’re talking about 26 percent of the population.

Dr. Michael Bader details precisely what we’d have to do now “if we took seriously what conservatives are hypocritically proposing.” Should you be interested in the minutiae of medical policy — Wayne LaPierre certainly isn’t — I urge you to read Dr. Bader’s excellent piece. You don’t have to. Rest assured that he convincingly demonstrates that “it would involve the greatest expansion of government involvement in the lives of Americans in the history of the republic.”

Not insignificant here is the issue of patients’ rights. The treatment of mental health is — like it or not — a service that often has to be imposed upon the patient. Here is where I in fact agree to an extent with the mindset embraced by the libertarian gun lobby: we should not be throwing citizens into psychiatric hospitals without due process, and forcing medication upon people without careful legal guidelines. Curtailing individual liberty is a truly dangerous business, and you don’t want to do it unnecessarily.

I’m sure Wayne LaPierre has considered all of this as well. But that’s okay, because he doesn’t expect this gambit to influence mental health policy in any substantial way. It’s a deflection strategy. A feint.

The mental health ruse on the part of the NRA and its apologists is in fact interesting, examined as a species of trickery. Online behavior presents us with a pertinent category: the internet has become middle-aged, and in its collective experience has generated all sorts of new genres, including wondrous variations on a certain foundational type — the troll.

Trolling has become subtle, and one of the more elegant methods of subverting debate is “concern trolling.” This is where you pretend to be deeply concerned about something that concerns you not in the slightest, so that you can undermine the conversation, derail it, and ultimately destroy it.

The NRA’s professed concern for mental health — as opposed to metastasizing gun cancer — makes this organization perhaps the largest and most efficient concern-troll collective in the nation.

Decent people do care about mental health issues, of course — profoundly — and LaPierre has tricked a great number of these people into thinking that the treatment of mental illness is crucial to the containment of gun violence. He has managed to convince them that this in fact trumps such concerns as the grotesque proliferation of civilian weaponry.

This is how concern trolling works: the troll appeals to one of our more admirable attributes — the human propensity to care — in order to further an agenda that is the opposite of admirable.

Do the mentally ill commit homicide? Yes. They do. In America and elsewhere. The difference — and do we really have to say this, yet again? — is that the mentally ill in America have far easier access to vastly more guns, so they kill in much greater numbers.

This truism should not have to be stated. That’s the point of truisms. Except that hundreds of thousands of Americans have decided that this risibly obvious truth is in fact false.

Moreover, to concentrate upon mental illness is to trivialize the moral dimension of the gun debate, and to neglect the great number of people who are very much an issue here, and are not mentally ill.

Joe Nocera in the New York Times gets it precisely wrong: “Anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill.”

Actually, no. Anyone who kills children is, by definition, evil.

Even if the killer is mentally ill, he is almost certainly evil to some extent as well. This medicalizing of moral categories is pernicious. Here again I am in sympathy with the conservative position — or what should be the conservative position. Scientism tends to be a disease of the left, which is always trying to find banal material explanations for matters that might just elude CAT scans. Whereas the right, in general, is more likely to conclude that people who do bad things are in fact bad people.

This is simplistic, of course: lots of leftists think very much in terms of good and evil individuals. Still, the tendency is something we associate more with, say, Churchill than Marx.

Here is where guns again pervert the debate. Only when it comes to matters like shooting children do American conservatives shy away from suggesting that someone is doing something evil because he is an evil person. No, it’s because he’s diseased.

This is often partially true, of course. Adam Lanza appears to have suffered from some species of mental illness, although nobody has convincingly provided an explanation for the causal link between this and the slaughter in Newtown. (No, Asperger’s syndrome is a neurological condition — not a mental illness — and does not correlate with murderous tendencies.) Depression is being discussed. And yes, shooters are often severely depressed, but so are 14.8 million American adults – some 6.7 percent of the population. Most of those afflicted are law-abiding citizens, and stigmatized enough as it is.

Is this a workable method of dealing with the gun crisis? Curing depression, an intractable condition that we’re already doing everything we can to alleviate? Even if we could demonstrate a meaningful correlation between violent crime and severe depression — which we can’t — it’s not really a practical approach.

We find a much more obvious link between mental illness and gun violence in Jared Lee Loughner, the mass shooter who attempted to assassinate US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and killed six others. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Loughner had to be forcibly treated with antipsychotic drugs for over a year before he was even competent to stand trial. (He should almost certainly be spending the rest of his life in a hospital for the criminally insane — not a prison — but that’s a separate issue.)

Some 2.4 million American adults are schizophrenic: about 1.1 percent of the nation. Schizophrenia does indeed correlate with violent criminal behavior. A rigorous epidemiological meta-study, however — which examined the analysis of statistics from Britain and America – concluded that: “The proportion of societal violence attributable to schizophrenia is small…. (It) consistently falls below 10%.”

If we wish to find a significant correlation, we have to turn to a form of insanity that is not in fact a mental illness. Yes, this is a paradox. Here we encounter a hugely complex issue, not just medically but morally. The causal connection is unambiguous, however: it is a condition responsible for a great number of homicides, including virtually all serial killings, as well as the massacre at Columbine.

Let’s talk about psychopaths.

Prior to the term “psychopath,” these people were often deemed ”morally insane.” Or were said to suffer from “madness without delirium.”

Now, what’s interesting about psychopathy is that moral insanity is a fair definition. Moreover, its diagnosis is debated tortuously by experts in the medical community: it is of pressing interest to psychiatric theorists.

And, furthermore, it is not a mental illness.

This last bit is arguable, but the world’s leading expert in this condition, Dr. Robert Hare at the University of British Columbia, has said:

I don’t feel comfortable calling it a disease. Much of (a psychopath’s) behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns we observe, could be because they’re using different strategies to get around the world. These strategies don’t have to involve faulty wiring, just different wiring.

Don’t get me wrong. Psychopaths are monstrous people, and Dr. Hare certainly recognizes this. He in fact seems to fall back on moral categories (perhaps unwittingly), in the absence of medical typology: “True saints, completely selfless individuals, are rare and unnatural too, (Hare) points out, but we don’t talk about their being diseased.”

Thanks to Dr. Hare’s diagnostic test — the PCL-R (Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised) — we are now much better at identifying these people. Eric Harris, one of the killers at Columbine, was almost certainly a psychopath. Serial killers are probably all psychopaths. It is an ugly, ugly phenomenon:

People who are psychopathic prey ruthlessly on others using charm, deceit, violence or other methods that allow them to get with they want. The symptoms of psychopathy include: lack of a conscience or sense of guilt, lack of empathy, egocentricity, pathological lying, repeated violations of social norms, disregard for the law, shallow emotions, and a history of victimizing others.

Quibbling about this category — whether it is simply evil, or a mental illness, or both — is not really what’s pertinent here. What’s pertinent — what lays this matter to rest, in terms of the gun debate — is that psychopathy is incurable.

There is no treatment.

Even less heartening: “Several studies have shown that existing treatment makes criminal psychopaths worse. In one, psychopaths who underwent social-skills and anger-management training before release had an 82 percent reconviction rate. Psychopaths who didn’t take the program had a 59 percent reconviction rate.”

Moreover, there is no viable legal remedy: you can’t simply lock all of these people away. It has been proposed, yes, but in ways that would not appeal, to put it mildly, to the NRA:

The United Kingdom… is in the process of creating a new legal classification called Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD). As it stands, the government proposes to allow authorities to detain people declared DSPD, even if they have not committed a crime. (Sample text from one of the Web sites that have sprung up in response: “I was diagnosed with an untreatable personality disorder by a doctor who saw me for ten minutes, he later claimed I was a psychopath…. Please don’t let them do this to me; don’t let them do it to anybody. I’m not a danger to the public, nor are most mentally ill people.”)

Despite the absence of such a policy in American and Canada, many of these people have in fact already been locked up: “In a typical prison population, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definition of a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violent crime.”

On the other hand, many are out there in the world, sometimes doing surprisingly well. If you wanted to preemptively imprison America’s psychopaths, you would probably have to decimate Wall Street. “Hare has said that if he couldn’t study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice.”

Approximately one percent of the general population would qualify as psychopaths, according to the PCL-R. The ones who have not been imprisoned — and there are a vast number — may well be managing your stock portfolio. Or standing beside you at the firing range. Or doing routine maintenance of that semiautomatic, after brushing up on the Second Amendment.

What have we discovered here? I remind you: the point of this exercise was to take Wayne LaPierre’s cynical advice seriously. Responsible and even thoughtful people are doing just that. Hey, the man has good ideas: if we address medical issues, rather than the availability of guns, then perhaps we can cure the slaughter of children with semiautomatic weapons.

As long as we don’t look too hard at what this would entail.

We would be attempting to preemptively cure millions of Americans whose homicidal tendencies cannot be identified. Or we would be taking unconstitutional steps to force a cure upon those whose tendencies have been identified, even though the great majority of them will never commit an offense: citizens suffering from schizophrenia.

Of course, we could target a group we know to be truly dangerous: psychopaths, who are responsible for over 50 percent of violent crime. These are people who — whether or not we wish to classify them as mentally ill — are almost certainly incurable.

It is a fool’s errand, but the man who would send us on it is no fool. Wayne LaPierre knows full well that this expensive and time-consuming idiots’ ballet would nicely divert resources from actual solutions: the ones that might keep guns from flowing efficiently onto the streets.

And the mental health ruse of course insures that we ignore an entire category of criminal, whose buying habits are crucial to the health of the gun market: vicious people who are neither psychopaths nor mentally ill.

The NRA receives its funding from two symbiotic groups: the people who make guns and ammunition (the NRA’s “corporate partners”) and the people who buy guns and ammunition (the NRA’s members). So keeping that flow robust is everything.

By all means, let’s put intelligence and will towards ameliorating the mental health crisis in America. There is no question that a national effort to treat schizophrenia more effectively would benefit both patient and society: it would greatly remedy homelessness, for instance, even if it would have only a minor effect upon the rate of violent crime. This kind of project is not inexpensive, as Dr. Bader points out above, but it is a matter central to our humanity, and an issue of urgent public concern. We can start by making a list of organizations whose expertise and intentions would accord perfectly with a civic project of this nature.

And if we’re truly credulous — okay, witless — we’ll put the National Rifle Association on that list.

We know what does work. Truly responsible hunters and target shooters will endorse it, but a certain demographic will howl. Of course, nobody has the guts to propose it, and nobody imagines that it has any hope of being implemented. So let’s examine the meaty, toothless options.

A ban on assault weapons sure sounds potent. It wouldn’t have made much of a difference in Columbine or Newtown (if any), but let’s put a fantastic amount of energy into it, so that we can say that we really did try to end the slaughter of the innocent.

Shall we talk specifically about what we won’t be banning?

Only one assault weapon was used at Columbine: it was a gun carried by Dylan Klebold, the depressive, as opposed to Eric Harris, the psychopath. Eric’s primary weapon was the sort that no proposed ban will get anywhere near.

Dylan’s main weapon was in fact banned, finally: a semi-automatic pistol, the TEC-DC9. This is an ugly gun, with an ugly history:

“The Intratec TEC DC-9 ‘assault pistol,’ also known as DC-9, TEC-9, or, if manufactured after 1994, as AB-10, bears the dubious distinction of being one of the most widely used ‘criminal’ guns in (the) USA. It was used in several mass murder cases, as well as an unknown, but definitely large number of street fights and other violent crimes. TEC-9 became ‘famous’ for its ‘evil’ appearance, large magazine capacity (which offered significant firepower), and for (its) low price. Unsurprisingly, these features made TEC-9 very popular among various marginal types. For any serious or professional shooter this gun was of little value.”

Nobody sane is suggesting that this gun not be prohibited. I do not intend to propose that because banning the ugliest guns does not work, we should therefore ban none of them. This line of thinking is embraced by only two groups, who have little else in common: defeatists and thugs. Chief spokesman for the latter, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, stressed this week that his organization retains complete faith in this non-approach to the issue.

Of course you ban assault weapons. Of course you’d be foolish to permit high-capacity magazines on the streets. I simply intend to demonstrate that you’d be foolish to stop there. It’s a first step, but it’s a specific kind of first step: the sort that’s thoroughly useless if you don’t take the second and third.

Hence it’s crucial to discuss the weapons that weren’t banned.

Both boys were carrying shotguns. They didn’t use them much. Eric’s was a pump-action shotgun, however, and he managed to get off twice as many rounds with it than Dylan with his slower double-barreled weapon. Here’s what’s special about a pump-action gun. The Art of Manliness website explains:

“The general consensus in the firearms community is that pump-action shotguns are the top choice for home defense. They’re relatively easy to use, nearly impossible to break, and are super reliable. More importantly, the sound of chambering a hot round into a pump-action 12 gauge is sure to soil the britches of even the most hardened criminal. As an added bonus, they’re relatively cheap, with prices beginning around $200.”

They’re slower than semiautomatic shotguns, but much less likely to jam. In other words: they are in some ways more useful than many often-banned weapons, if you intend to shoot a huge number of people, quickly.

Note that Eric and Dylan — although they were not in fact goths as reported — did have a truly sinister aesthetic sensibility: They chose a type of weapon famous for looking exceptionally ugly (the TEC-DC9), and another famous for sounding exceptionally ugly (the pump-action shotgun). Gun aficionados know that these weapons involve levels of cruelty, some of them not widely understood outside of that world. Terror is what you induce before death.

At any rate, neither boy relied much on his shotgun. Eric, the psychopath, used a cheap Hi-Point Model 995 carbine rifle as his primary killing device. Here’s where the irony should begin to sicken you. The Hi-Point not only wasn’t banned, but it was developed during the ban: it was specifically designed to accord with the new law. We’ll encounter a variant of this all-too-common irony in Newtown. Eric’s rifle, at the time of Columbine (mid-ban), was restricted to a 10-round magazine. Only after the ban was lifted in 2004, were 15-round magazines available for this model.

As I say, of course we require a ban on high-capacity magazines. It’s simply important to know what we won’t catch in that net. These magazines are “variously defined as those holding more than 10, 15, or 20 rounds.” Which is to say, the term does not describe the magazines used by Eric Harris at Columbine.

Clayton E. Cramer, who teaches at the College of Western Idaho and has studied this, puts it bluntly:

“To replace an empty magazine with a fully loaded one typically takes one to two seconds, even under stressful conditions… How much actual ‘advantage’ does a high-capacity magazine give to a monster who is shooting unarmed people? Practically none.”

The New York Times reports statistics that come to the same conclusion:

“The federal ban also yielded mixed results in its decade of existence. A 2004 study by the University of Pennsylvania, financed by the Justice Department, found that the measure, which included a ban on ammunition magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds, had only a limited impact on gun crime.”

Dylan, with his less violent nature, had the aforementioned TEC-DC9, which I’ve also discussed here. The TEC-DC9 is significant for the same reason as the Hi-Point. It represents a kind of gun that we’re guaranteed to encounter again, when we fail to produce adequate gun laws: a grotesque weapon inspired by a ban on weapons.

In particular, the TEC-DC9 was born as a result of California’s ban on an earlier version, the TEC-9, after the Cleveland School Massacre in 1989. The new weapon — and we’ll encounter this too, again and again — was named for the ban. “DC” means “Designed for California.”

This weapon, in its new form, was banned again, with predictable consequences (including a new name, inspired by the new ban):

“The 1994 crime bill banned the TEC-9 and the TEC-DC9 by name. But, following enactment of the ban, Intratec retooled its product line to follow the letter, but certainly not the spirit, of the law. The company began producing the AB-10, a slightly modified version of the TEC-DC9 that was technically legal under the law (AB stands for ‘after ban’). Intratec sells the gun with a pre-ban 32-round ammunition magazine despite the fact that production of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds was also banned in 1994. At the same time the company began marketing a new line of Saturday Night Special handguns, or ‘junk guns,’ promising its customers, ‘The Legend Continues… ‘”

And continues. And continues. This kind of cleverness is the reason that the Newport massacre would have been effortless, even if the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban hadn’t expired during the gun-positive Bush administration. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Intratec, the company that produced the TEC-DC9, marketed this weapon with emphasis on its “high fire-power, a threaded barrel for the easy attachment of a silencer, and the gun’s ‘excellent resistance to fingerprints.’”

In short: it marketed this weapon to murderers.

Note that Eric, with his inferior weaponry, fired nearly twice as many shots as Dylan. Dave Cullen, who has studied this for a decade, points out that this may have been psychological: “This suggests Dylan was slow to get fully involved. But once they were inside, it got much closer to even, with Eric firing just 20 percent more.” Eric still managed to be more efficient, however, with an unbannable weapon.

Newtown is in some ways more pertinent, when we discuss precisely what the proposed ban won’t accomplish. It says something about the well-meaning ignorance of legislators, and the malignant cunning of gun-lovers.

Adam Lanza’s mother had a legally registered Bushmaster AR-15 type. We’ve heard different reports regarding the precise model, but we have a pretty good idea what kind of weapon it was. His mother’s was a variant of Michele Bachmann’s favorite. She too loves the AR-15: “That is a great gun.”

George Zornick in The Nation just published an informative piece: “How Walmart Helped Make the Newtown Shooter’s AR-15 the Most Popular Assault Weapon in America.” He explains:

The model is familiar to many Walmart shoppers. It’s on sale at about 1,700 Walmart stores nationwide, though the retail chain pulled the weapon from its website three days after the attack… Executive vice president Duncan Mac Naughton told shareholders at a meeting in October 2012 that gun sales in particular are a staple of the chain’s strategy to continue boosting its numbers.

For the moment I’ll assume that Lanza’s version of this ubiquitous weapon was a Bushmaster M4 Type Carbine, as was reported on Slate, because that illustrates — again — the despair in store for us when we finally achieve another assault weapons ban.

The M4 legally available to the public is a semi-automatic version of a weapon used by the military (where it’s fully automatic). And, yes, the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban gave rise to a special model of this gun, named for the ban itself: the “M4 Type Post-Ban Carbine.” It will be interesting to find out whether the version purchased by Adam Lanza’s mother was this one, or perhaps the one made after the ban expired (post-Post-Ban). Not all that interesting, in that the difference between the banned version and the unbanned version was completely trivial. Some have described it as “cosmetic.” In order to be rendered something other than an assault weapon, the M4 had to be deprived of such details as bayonet lugs.

There is no question — none — that Adam Lanza could have murdered those children with a banned version of the M4.

Hence, when we find out which version he used, we will have found out very little, except that a return to the hard-won Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 will do nothing to keep your children safer.

I have noted that I am not a defeatist. By no means have I come to the conclusion that gun legislation is ineffective. I am simply demonstrating that the kind of legislation being discussed is pure folly, or worse: utterly cynical. The “middle ground” is simply another name for the killing fields.

We do, however, know what works. We know this for the simple reason that it has been tried, with staggering success. We’ll call this the Australian Model. Now, there are those who argue that America is a unique nation, given its brutal history. The story of western expansion — which gave us that uniquely American genre, the Western — is a story inextricable from guns. This argument suggests that violence is somehow woven into the American DNA, in a way that it simply isn’t elsewhere.

Yes, America had a rough past, featuring some pretty hard men. Unlike Australia, which was founded as a prison colony.

What will work — and it will require a seismic shift in the American psyche, of the sort rarely experienced in history — is the uncompromising policy described below. I have quoted this anonymous statement before, in hopes that it would go viral, and it is getting close to doing just that. So let me quote it again. Unless we wish to be conquered by despair, this is what America simply must do:

“From 1984 to 1996, Australia had over a dozen mass murders by firearms, largely copycat killings prompted by media coverage in the U.S. and in Australia. Unstable people do insane things. After one lone nut gunman killed 35 and wounded 21 people in 1996, the Port Arthur Massacre, Prime Minister John Howard banned all semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns because of the outrage felt by Australian citizens. He introduced highly restrictive gun licensing laws. Hundreds of thousands of guns were purchased from Australian citizens and destroyed.

Do you know how many mass shootings we have had since then? Not one. In addition, firearm homicides have dropped 59% with no corresponding increase in non-firearm murders.

People kill people, not guns? Rubbish. Guns give the mentally ill ruthlessly efficient killing power, and escalate domestic violence from assault to homicide. The U.S. needs to act now, and the gun lobby needs to wake up to its culpability.”

You do not partially treat an aggressive cancer.

Still, please note what did not happen in Australia: Hunters and target shooters were not forced to take up knitting. Their guns were not confiscated, and their activities were not rendered illegal. They do have to jump through a few more hoops than mass killers at gun shows in the United States. A “Permit to Acquire” is necessary, and the first time a civilian purchases a gun, this calls for a 28-day delay. Hence, potential suicides cannot make spur-of-the-moment purchases, nor can angry citizens who otherwise might not commit homicide.

A gun owner is required to have a secure place to store the weapon. After the Sandy Hook massacre, is it really possible to regard this as a bad idea?

Only a couple of aspects of the Australian Model would legitimately outrage a predictable group. The ban would be retroactive. Citizens would then have to specify why they wish to keep or purchase an unbanned gun. Sufficient reasons would include hunting, pest control, and target shooting. Insufficient reasons would include, notably, “self defense.” Anyone with a demented understanding of the Constitution would be outraged by this, and you ought to welcome their outrage. They are a menace.

On the other hand, responsible target shooters and hunters are not a danger to your children. Moreover, many of these Americans — who understand guns in a practical (but not paranoid) way — are very much in favor of gun control. The Australian Model would not really affect their lives much. It would involve a bit more paperwork; they’d have to forgo weapons favored by mercenaries; and they’d have to demonstrate that they lived this side of psychosis. The law would now require them to lock up their guns intelligently, so that their children did not shoot other children.

Certain overlapping sectors of society would be truly affected: the suspiciously manly, the conspiratorial, and the deeply unhinged, as well as the lobbies that keep them on edge and the dealers that keep them supplied. Companies that specialize in semiautomatics and pump-action shot guns would have to revise their product lines. The NRA would suffer, or it would change. Most likely it would suffer.

This is all hypothetical, of course, because the chances of America adopting anything like the Australian Model are depressingly faint. Nobody has the stomach for the battle that this would involve: It would take the kind of principled courage we associate with wars that are actually won.

The words “courage” and “honor” have been redefined, unfortunately, and are now owned wholly by people who feel intimidated if they’re without semi-automatics to defend themselves. Who feel it’s important to go hunting with weaponry appropriate to SEAL Team Six, because that’s the only way they’re fully assured of taking down a deer. Until these words are reoccupied by the American people, illiterate constitutional scholars who purchase “courage” and “honor” at barely-regulated gun shows will continue to achieve a compromise — which is to say, win — and children will continue to die.

Should the world end, it won’t be remembered as vividly as Paul McCartney’s appearance with the surviving members of Nirvana: an incident that produced indifferent music, but introduced the world to the Next Big Thing — an instrument that will change the face of rock and roll.

Just to be sure that it will change the face of rock and roll (Paul’s good at this), he appeared with this same instrument, and these same remnants of a band, a second time. On this occasion the results were not so much indifferent, as different. That’s not entirely fair: this time Sir Paul’s slide cigar work was properly front and center, and it was jaw-dropping.

The advent of the Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) may not be as important as the introduction of the Fender Telecaster. I guarantee, however, that music historians will consider Kurt Cobain’s Jag-Stang a mere blip on the iconic radar relative to this new instrument.

All right, this new instrument is in fact older than your great-grandfather. The difference is that Paul McCartney never played one in front of a huge audience in 1850. He waited until 2012.

To be precise, that odd-looking beast hanging around the neck of Sir Paul was a Resofiddle, built by Matty Baratto, one of the shining lights of today’s cigar box guitar revival. It is Barrato’s Dobro-like version of the CBG, and the circular metal thing on the front is a cone, just as you’d find on an expensive resonator guitar. This one was made with a paint-can lid.

Baratto’s standard model of cigar box guitar, sans resonator, is called the Cigfiddle. It’s really nice. I want one.

That’s okay: I’m about to have another fine instrument, banged together by another vaunted cigar box luthier: Bluesboy Jag. En route to me is a three-string Avo Heritage, which I particularly admire, because it sounds like this:

(That is in fact my very guitar. You can’t have it. It is currently being abused by the Mexican postal service, and I expect it to arrive any moment.)

Yes, these are made with actual cigar boxes. “Avo Heritage”, before it was the name of my guitar, was the name of a cigar.

If I really wanted to be legit, I’d kludge together my own CBG. Most people do — that’s the whole point. Back in the day, blues players — including the most revered — could not afford luxe instruments like Martins and Gibsons. They bought mail-order guitars from Sears, Roebuck & Co. And if they couldn’t afford one of those, they made their own. The home-made guitar in fact antedates Sears Roebuck itself by quite a stretch.

Now, if you’re going to make a guitar-like instrument, you need a hollow, resonating chamber. These days, such a chamber might have a face of Italian Alpine Spruce (favored by Stradivarius), with sides and backs of Brazilian rosewood (endangered and illegal), and set you back thousands of dollars. Such a guitar makes a truly refined sound, and I want one of those as well. On the other hand, a $3 cigar-box works too, and makes a sound that is arguably superior for certain kinds of music. Not “arguably.” It just is.

You don’t want to play gutbucket blues on a boutique instrument crafted by elves beneath the watchful eye of a master luthier. You want a cigar box, nailed to a blunt neck: preferably red oak. That nut and bridge carved from fossilized mastodon tusk (yerp, you can buy those) are just not appropriate: threaded bolts will do — the kind of bog-standard bolts you use to put together bad furniture. That’s right… drumroll… the nut is a bolt. The bolt is post-mastodon, in Darwinian terms, but way pre-fossil, when it comes to guitar history.

If you’re too lazy to build a cigar box guitar yourself — or simply want something above your skill level — Bluesboy Jag is the sort of builder you want. He hammers together CBGs in his laundry room, when he’s not gigging. He hand-winds his own pickups. He makes bass drums out of suitcases.

Matty Baratto is more of the high-end luthier kind of guy, since he also makes bespoke non-cigar-box guitars — expensive ones — for famous people. Baratto’s famous-person CBG, however, is nicely primitive. Yes, somebody once smoked cigars delivered in the resonant box now played onstage by Paul McCartney.

I’m a bit late to the cigar box revival, which is at least a decade old. This is because I am, fundamentally, uncool. There are a few people less cool than me — I do play passable slide guitar, really badly, and this gives me a touch of street cred. Unfortunately, you can manage a wretched rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” – and still be So Ten Minutes Ago. In fact, you’re going to be. Pretty much by definition. So, like the rest of the world, I discovered the cigar box guitar at that crucial moment in history, just prior to the end of that same world, in which Paul McCartney appeared onstage with a funny-looking thing that I couldn’t identify.

I did ask this precise question in a Facebook update (trying to beef up my cred here): “What the hell is he playing — an electrified Dobro cigar-box ukulele?”

And lo: he sort of was.

The howls of indignation have been heard nationwide. Haven’t they? Except that this was a decade ago, and the father in question lost his son at Columbine, and I’m pretty confident that you never even heard about this incident.

Chances are that the parents of children gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School will not have these precise words thrown at them. Even Second Amendment absolutists don’t expect six-year-olds to wield .45s. No, but we’ve already heard variants of this taunt on bulletin boards, aimed at the first-grade teachers in Newport: you idiots should have been carrying guns.

What have we done for Tom Mauser, who lost his son thanks to the NRA? Yes, thanks to the NRA. Daniel Mauser was shot by adolescent killers who effortlessly acquired weapons appropriate to an ambitious massacre. Specifically, he was shot by Eric Harris, a psychopath who managed to get his hands on a Hi-Point model 995 carbine rifle, as well as a 12-gauge Savage-Springfield 67H pump-action shotgun. And Harris would never, ever have managed this, were it not for strident insistence upon a young civilian’s freedom to do so by the National Rifle Association.

One of the killer’s friends, an 18-year-old girl, bought the rifle and two shotguns at the Tanner Gun Show. Because she was 18, the girl had every right to purchase not-trivial weapons.

Do you think that this girl could have bought these guns for her friends in England? In Canada? In Japan? Despite what you’ve heard from sophists, even in Switzerland 18-year-old kids cannot purchase rifles and shotguns at barely-regulated gun shows.

This girl was never prosecuted for her part in the Columbine massacre. She pleaded ignorance of the boys’ intentions; I expect she was truly unaware. And why lay this at the feet of an 18-year-old girl, too young to purchase a drink? The casual availability of this kind of weaponry to a girl this age — legally sold to her by a non-licensed dealer at a gun show — is directly and without question the fault of the NRA.

Were it not for this lobby, such an uncomplicated purchase would be unthinkable; compare every other civilized nation on earth. No other liberal democracy is plagued by a lobby as repulsive and irresponsible as America’s National Rifle Association.

Tom Mauser was demonstrating in front of NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia when he was dressed down by that practical, manly gun-lover: too bad your dead son wasn’t packing.

Why was Tom Mauser in Virginia, two years after Daniel’s murder? It’s a painful story. First he tried to deal with the National Rifle Association the way that good citizens deal with responsible organizations: he wrote them a letter. Daniel’s father wrote an extremely polite and reasonable letter to Charlton Heston — nowhere near as angry as this piece I am writing now — and he wrote it on May 11, 1999, three weeks after his son was gunned down in cold blood for the simple crime of attending high school.

Tom Mauser is a much better man than I am. I mean that. I have never lost a loved one to gunfire, and my hatred of the NRA is blinding; it borders on unseemly. Here is what Mauser did after two years of silence from the lobby responsible for the death of his son:

I went to the NRA national offices in Fairfax, Virginia. I carried a sign with Daniel’s picture on it. On one side were the words, “My son Daniel died at Columbine. He would expect me to be here today.” On the other it read, “Why won’t Heston respond to me?”

Tom Mauser politely approached a security guard, requesting an audience with Charlton Heston. The NRA responded by sending out a photographer, who silently documented Mauser’s trespassing.

Daniel’s father did hear from a man who was not speaking officially for the NRA — although I strongly suspect that he has donated to them, has voted for their approved candidates, and loudly supports everything that they stand for. This man drove by in a car, and yelled — this time I won’t censor it: “Your son should have had a gun, you stupid motherfucker.”

By the way, Daniel Mauser was 15 when he was murdered. So this stern parental reprimand was not precisely fair. No, not even the NRA has managed to make it legal for a 15-year-old boy to carry a gun to high school.

After this encounter with a citizen, Mauser received an official response from the National Rifle Association:

At about 4:30, the NRA said they wanted me off their property. When I refused to (go), I was arrested, handcuffed and put into a patrol car. I was arrested on misdemeanor trespass charges, spent about an hour in a holding cell with about 18 other men and was released on $250 bail.

Tom Mauser is something of a saint. Informed that he was about to be arrested, “I told them I had certainly had worse things happen.”

What bothers me — what makes me want to scream — is that Tom Mauser never had better things happen. Nobody came to his defense. He spent $2,000 of his own money answering the misdemeanor charges, which were dismissed for lack of witnesses.

The nation is currently outraged at a massacre of first-graders. Daniel Mauser was not six years old, it is true. He was 15. Perhaps we tell ourselves that Tom Mauser’s heart is less broken by this discrepancy in age. That Daniel’s murder was somehow less of a tragedy. How else do we explain our complete indifference to his quiet but very public suffering?

I urge you to read this account of Daniel by his mother, Linda: “Who Was Daniel Mauser? A Memoir by a Columbine Parent.”

Linda Mauser’s blog is introduced by a quotation from Euripides: “The good and the wise lead quiet lives.”

Tom and Linda are in many ways too good. Perhaps too wise. Euripides was not speaking, however — I am fairly certain — about a nation’s silent indifference to their suffering. Sometimes the good and the wise are called upon to scream.

Tom Mauser is not completely quiet. He protests, peacefully. He delivers speeches. When he speaks to an audience, he tends to wear the tennis shoes that Daniel was wearing when he was shot by Eric Harris.

It is very draining. But it is what I have committed to do. It is how I honor my son. Parents should not have to walk in the shoes of a slain child.

The Mausers have accomplished something in the way of legislation. “He helped close a loop hole in Colorado that made it harder to buy weapons at gun shows without a background check.” This was not enough to prevent 26 people — mostly children — from being gunned down in a small New England town, but it might have saved Daniel. Perhaps. Probably not.

Even if you have not heard about Tom and Linda Mauser, I assure you: the men who own semi-automatics and pump-action shotguns have. Tom in particular is vilified on gun sites around the web. What was said to him on that day in Fairfax was mild relative to what is done to his name, regularly, by people outraged at his small efforts to curtail their weaponry.

He has been accused of lying about his son’s death, because he said just after the massacre that Daniel was shot with a TEC-DC9 semi-automatic pistol, which is classified as an assault weapon. Clearly this was a deliberate effort to slur assault weapons, since we know that the TEC-DC9 was carried by the other killer, Dylan Klebold. I’m sorry, but Daniel was shot with an ordinary rifle.

The point of lying is difficult to nail down. Klebold certainly killed people with the TEC-DC9. It was his primary weapon — this blowback-operated semi-automatic handgun — and he fired it 55 times. Yes, this assault weapon killed people. That’s what assault weapons do.

Still, how are we supposed to take a man seriously when he can’t even get his guns right? The fact is that Tom Mauser is a traitor to the Constitution. An enemy of freedom. He is clearly obsessed with achieving an indiscriminate, permanent ban on coveted weapons like the TEC-DC9. Furthermore, he dares to protest that his son was murdered in accordance with the Second Amendment.

Ordinary citizens — ignorant of lethal minutiae — have pretty much forgotten Tom Mauser. Unless you care about your semi-automatics being taken from you, what does one mourning parent matter? Furthermore, what’s the point of banning assault weapons, when Daniel was killed with an ordinary rifle, or perhaps a sawed-off shotgun?

Will we act the same way towards the parents of the children murdered on December 14 — two weeks before Christmas — by an assault weapon whose casual availability is the fault of the National Rifle Association? Or will we perhaps do something about it?

Much can be done. No lobby, however wealthy and well-armed, is more powerful than the American people. Democracy works this way: it has non-violent means of purging malignant elements. Sometimes violence is necessary — the end of slavery could not have been achieved by anything less than war — but America has generally conquered evil in its midst by careful and deliberate due process.

The Civil War was an anomaly. McCarthyism was the norm: a threat to democracy laid to rest by the legislative branch of the American government. The NRA is certainly less of an evil than slavery, but is it really less ugly than McCarthyism? How many lives did Joseph McCarthy take? Let’s count the innocent children, to be precise, slaughtered as a result of Senator McCarthy’s policies. Now weigh that number (which — unless I’m mistaken — is zero) against the bloody, miserable body count which is a direct consequence of the policies shoveled onto the nation by the NRA.

Yes, despite widespread defeatism, much can be done. There are options. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York has taken the initiative, and has won significant victories against the NRA, as I discuss here.

Jane Smiley, a novelist with a superb mind, has laid out a series of precise and viable proposals, in “A Few Remedies for the Right to Bear Arms.” Myself, I have written something of a manifesto. It is a much less polite document — essentially a battle plan: a call for a counter-lobby as wealthy and relentless as the National Rifle Association.

The NRA are very, very strong, but they are not invincible, and these are efficient, detailed strategies to strip them of their undeserved power over American citizens.

This battle will require action — the kind of action the nation has never taken on behalf of Tom Mauser, despite the outrage against Columbine. It will require money — much greater amounts of money than the $2,000 that were never reimbursed to Tom Mauser. Fine. Since when are political engagement and funding an impossibility for an American populace motivated by legitimate outrage?

Yes, we are asking soccer moms to go up against armed survivalists. And yes: I put my money on the soccer moms. Paranoid gun thugs in fact care less about themselves than mothers care about their children. Ideology is powerful, but it withers relative to blood ties: a mother’s fearsome determination to preserve the safety of her children is one of brute nature’s more uplifting phenomena. (I’m not being sentimental. If you want to put bromides about mom and apple pie into perspective, threaten a newborn wild boar.)

One comment beneath my unpleasant manifesto spoke volumes: “I’d pay $35 a year to be a member of a an organization that lobbies for peace and against guns. Let’s do it.”

Wouldn’t you? When you think about it? If a national lobby were forged — right now — willing to go up against the NRA, wouldn’t you toss at least $35 in its direction? Perhaps more? Perhaps as much as the average card-carrying member donates to the organization that puts your family in danger?

I have a tendency to phrase things in much less peaceful terms than the comment above — and I am often taken to task for militant language in the cause of peace — but you have to speak from the heart, and my heart is not at the moment a very peaceful place. So let me put this in words that will no doubt make you uncomfortable, but are addressed to the mothers and fathers I genuinely believe can take down this vile lobby:

Who do you love more: your own children, or paranoid survivalists with constitutionally-ordained assault weapons?

Refuse to vote for a candidate who has received anything better than a D from the National Rifle Association. Be generous: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may not run again, but if he makes good on his change of heart — if he trades his disgraceful B rating for a D or an F — then offer him your qualified support.

The issue here is not freedom: it is the opposite. It is blackmail. Decent people are afraid to run on an anti-gun platform, because the NRA makes it very clear that they will then fund a reliably bloodthirsty opponent.

Hence, the second prong of any successful bid to topple the NRA’s stranglehold on America’s freedom is money. Lots of it. If a national organization devoted to the election of D and F candidates could achieve a budget to rival the gun lobby’s — and for the first time in history this seems possible — then it could effectively neutralize these threats. A new surgically-focused lobby would infuse funds into any campaign endangered by blackmail. This would be the precondition for eligibility: intimidation by the NRA.

There is a precedent for this tactic. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s personal Super PAC has demonstrated the efficacy of standing up to the National Rifle Association, dollar for dollar. In California’s 35th District, Gloria Negrete McLeod was in danger of being crushed by her opponent in the last election, Rep. Joe Baca, who had been anointed by the NRA. Bloomberg’s PAC, Independence America, bolstered McLeod’s campaign to the tune of $2.7 million, and the candidate surged back from a dire position to win the election. US News reported that, ”McLeod had been trailing the NRA-supported Baca by double digits.”

Mayor Bloomberg understands more than most how “independence” here is not so much a lofty ideal, as a brute financial fact. His own independence — his personal wealth — renders him untouchable. It has not, however, rendered him soft. Bloomberg has demonstrated unparalleled leadership throughout this conflict, and I can think of no one better to marshal the forces required. Versions of what I am calling for already exist, in various forms — some local, some national — but nothing on the level of an army as well-funded and relentless as the National Rifle Association.

The military language is deliberate, of course. A war is precisely what we are discussing: a bloodless war, along the lines of the Velvet Revolution. Contrary to the old saw, you don’t have to bring guns to a gun fight. In the modern era, superior tactics and ruthless determination have enjoyed a surprisingly good track record against blunt force.

Never forget that this is very much a war, however: a battle against an organization that endangers the lives of your children.

The third prong of this attack is linguistic. The NRA does not like to see themselves described as “an organization that endangers the lives of your children.” They bridle at such language. Too bad. Winning this war requires a merciless commitment to the truth. This means truthful description and truthful terminology.

The word “freedom,” for instance. We never hear Americans talk about freedom from the Second Amendment. Note how odd that sentence sounds. The very terms of the debate have been defined by quasi-medieval vigilantes, who stockpile weapons against a fictional doomsday scenario in which their “freedom” will be taken from them. Most Americans, however, wish to be free from these people. It is a natural wish, shared by humans around the world: a defining feature of liberal democracy is the protection of citizens from armed, unelected thugs.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The NRA would deprive you of the first and third, by redefining the second.

Gun hoarders are not, fundamentally, champions of democracy. Their cherished form of governmental transition is not the election of a new administration: it is the overthrow of a regime by violence. This is the scenario they have armed themselves to enjoy. It is their idea of a voting booth.

Some will dismiss this as an extreme characterization. A parody. I’ll ask these people to consider how many Americans purchased guns in anticipation of Barack Obama’s reelection. Ponder this. We are discussing citizens of a civilized nation, arming themselves in the event of a candidate winning office through a free and transparent election.

These people are not committed to freedom. Or rather, they are committed to a definition of freedom that is not recognized anywhere else in the free world.

When I talk about “freedom from the Second Amendment,” I am talking about freedom from a very specific fantasy regarding that amendment: a paranoid understanding of its content and intent. America deserves to be free from a survivalist reading of the Second Amendment.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court — in a predictable 5-4 decision — has determined that this perverse reading is in fact consonant with the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the majority opinion for the Magnificent Five, expressed crocodile regret: “Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

The “some” who “think” — the people to whom Scalia refers — are the citizens of America who do not wish to see their children gunned down with semi-automatic weapons.

Scalia is of course correct: to pronounce the death of the Second Amendment is properly the job of another branch of government. And it would be hard to overstate the madness of pursuing that path: the sheer folly of suggesting that perhaps it is time to re-amend the Constitution. Those who consider amendment sacrilege — who shriek at the very thought of tinkering with the Constitution — will not be easily swayed: they are bitterly wedded to their amendment.

Scalia’s majority opinion, by the way, puts the lie to his purported originalism. Nobody genuinely concerned with the Founding Father’s intent would ever use these words: “our standing army is the pride of our nation.” Very few things terrified the Founding Fathers more than the idea of a standing army.

Thomas Jefferson was adamant: “Standing armies (are) inconsistent with (a people’s) freedom and subversive of their quiet.”

James Madison agreed: “As the greatest danger to liberty is from large standing armies, it is best to prevent them by an effectual provision for a good militia.”

Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts echoed this, and his words unambiguously illuminate the Second Amendment: “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.”

The well-trained militia was, yes, intended as a substitute for a standing army. And now that America has the second largest standing army in the world, this provision is little more than an inflamed vestigial organ: a diseased appendix to the body politic. Today’s self-styled militia is restricted to a group of paranoid he-people, who genuinely believe that they could — if necessary — overthrow the American government with their .223 caliber Bushmaster semi-automatics.

In its advertisement for the type of weapon used by the child-killer Adam Lanza, Bushmaster’s slogan reads: “Consider Your Man Card Reissued.” Lots of people out there feel as if they’re man-card-carrying alphas. And if they were to take up arms against the federal government — which is to say, against the United States Armed Forces — they would be squashed like cockroaches. Their Bushmasters would be approximately as useful as squirt guns against Apache attack helicopters, for instance, which have rarely been brought down by missiles far more powerful than anything available to an American civilian. Sorry, my rugged individual, but your “well-trained militia” is a joke. Consider your cockroach card reissued.

No, this side of Afghanistan, your Bushmaster M4 Type Carbines are useful for one thing, and one thing only: hunting humans. Preferably children, because children are never in a position to return fire. Bushmaster Firearms International, LLC — a fantastically wealthy and cynical corporation — has reissued your faux man card, and it is time for decent citizens to take it away. Perhaps you’ll be issued a human card, if you properly demonstrate that you deserve one.

That charming ad also has this to say: “If it’s good enough for the professional, it’s good enough for you.” Um, no. If it’s good enough for the professional, it should be kept far away from you. Unless you wish to become a professional. This is of course a very real option, for people who wish to earn their man card: join the Army. You’ll be issued a fully automatic version of this weapon — in case you consider Lanza’s a toy — and you’ll be up against armed people who shoot back, as opposed to children.

I will be accused, I know, of “exploiting this tragedy.” Fine. Guilty as charged. I urge you to join me: exploit the hell out of this bitter, hellish situation, if it means preserving your children from killers enabled by the gun lobby.

Do not let anyone tell you that, “Now is the time to mourn, not fight.” This is precisely wrong: now is the time to mourn and fight. If the NRA insists that “we should not play politics with tragedy,” I assure you: it’s not a call for decorous behavior. It’s an exhortation to lose. You don’t want to do anything so crass as to found a lobby and raise money while the nation is grieving. Do it later, when you’re guaranteed to fail.

This, then, is the crucial three-pronged approach to ending the tyranny of the NRA. Votes. Money. And language. You may despair that this is all that you have, when you’re up against semi-automatic rifles. I assure you, however: it is more than enough. Better-armed strongmen than the National Rifle Association have been brought down by unarmed opponents. The citizens of Eastern Europe, for instance, did not outgun their tyrants.

This requires a different category of heroism.

An F candidate is an American hero, yes, and should be welcomed to office as one. He or she ought to be funded properly, so that the gun lobby ceases to be a factor in otherwise healthy elections. And “freedom” should be redefined to mean what the word means elsewhere in the free world.

This linguistic reversal will take some doing. Bushmaster Firearms International, for instance — along with Remington — is owned by the “Freedom Group”. (And that multi-headed group, for aficionados of irony, is owned by Cerberus Capital Management.)

Decent people deserve a less Orwellian shade of freedom. They should insist upon, for instance, freedom from arbitrary death at the end of a gun blessed by the National Rifle Association. They should demand freedom from the NRA itself: a venomous bloc who would make their children fair game for paranoid thugs; a lobby whose express purpose is to insure that these thugs have the right to carry semi-automatic weapons, high-capacity magazines, and man cards.

I’ll leave you with a quotation that has been floating around the internet in the last few days, in various forms. I do not know the origins, but it is easy enough to verify the content. May it go viral.

From 1984 to 1996, Australia had over a dozen mass murders by firearms, largely copycat killings prompted by media coverage in the U.S. and in Australia. Unstable people do insane things. After one lone nut gunman killed 35 and wounded 21 people in 1996, the Port Arthur Massacre, Prime Minister John Howard banned all semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns because of the outrage felt by Australian citizens. He introduced highly restrictive gun licensing laws. Hundreds of thousands of guns were purchased from Australian citizens and destroyed.

Do you know how many mass shootings we have had since then? Not one. In addition, firearm homicides have dropped 59% with no corresponding increase in non-firearm murders.

People kill people, not guns? Rubbish. Guns give the mentally ill ruthlessly efficient killing power, and escalate domestic violence from assault to homicide. The US needs to act now, and the gun lobby needs to wake up to its culpability.

Though I find this premise appalling, it seems to be the conventional wisdom. Apparently, it’s the way that caring people think.

Writing in The Jerusalm Post, Israeli Sharon Udasin quoted Nofar Gal, who lives near the border with Gaza: “The situation in the South has been very difficult not only for us humans but also for our pets.” Gal’s dog, Pitzy, “has particularly been affected by the alarms and explosions, perpetually crying and sleeping only in the family’s bed, as well as needing medicine to calm her nerves.”

Udasin writes about animals regularly; that’s part of her purview as a journalist. She betrays sympathyeven for animals on the other side of the border: “If Gazans have pets they are concerned about, then they are welcome to contact me…”

Predictably, her writing about an Israeli’s pet dog triggered outrage in sensitive non-Israelis. The professionally sensitive — liberal reporters — were especially incensed. Typical was Rory MacKinnon, a New Zealander who writes for London’s Morning Star:

@sharonudasin stalks the wards of Shifa hospital in #Gaza. “Doctor, with all these people injured or dead, who will feed their cats?”

He expanded on this liberal thought, excoriating Udasin for her “ghoulish search for stressed pets in Tel Aviv as children literally die by the dozen in Gaza.”

So, the obvious, the decent response is to sneer at Israelis for caring about their pets. Good liberal folk — the ones who have mature priorities — recognize that innocent dogs and cats just don’t matter, given the severity of the situation. And what’s particularly obvious is that the feelings of Israelis who care about these creatures are of no consequence whatsoever. I mean, let’s be adults.

Now, I too am a liberal reporter, but of the unprofessional and insensitive variety. I can’t help noting, for instance, that these same decent souls almost certainly felt bad for Americans whose pets suffered as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

Of course, that was different: storms are Acts of God.

Here we’re talking about deadly shells launched by Hamas. Which are not Acts of God — not by a long shot. When you think about it, however, Acts of Evil People are in fact somewhat uglier. Shouldn’t you have even more sympathy for Israelis in this circumstance?

Unless — and this is the real subtext here — you feel that Israeli citizens should be okay with explosives raining down upon them. After all, they brought this on themselves, right?

Okay, let’s reframe the analogy. Surely Americans living near Wall Street shouldn’t have been concerned when their pets were endangered by terrorists on 9/11. That would have been shallow, right? People were dying. A family pet you’ve cared for — have lived with for years — might be traumatized or lost? You’re upset by this? Grow up.

Ah, but that was clearly different: America doesn’t deserve its terrorists, whereas Israel does.

Am I suggesting that America deserved to be bombed by bin Laden? Um, no. Quite the opposite: I’m suggesting that Israel doesn’t deserve to be shelled, year round, by thugs across the border. And no, that’s not how I’m describing the Palestinian people: that’s how I’m describing the tyrants they were foolish enough to elect in Gaza, and now find themselves incapable of unelecting.

These are the gangsters who are shelling Israel. And yes, as with America’s enemies, they’re a lot weaker and poorer than the people they’re terrorizing. They bear profound historical grudges, just as America’s enemies do. Some of those grievances are legitimate.

And they are criminals.

Now, we can argue about the appropriate military response to these criminals: whether certain diplomatic solutions should take precedence; whether aerial retaliation is appropriate; whether sending in ground troops might be excessive or tactically foolish. But sorry, friends, this is not really a matter of dispute: Israelis are allowed to care if their beloved pets are distressed or killed by Hamas.

Dashiell Bennett has a good piece in The Atlantic, pointing out that Americans have in fact always worried about and mourned their animals in times of crisis. He discusses Hurricane Sandy, but also much earlier catastrophes, some of them man-made: “One of Civil War photographer Matthew Brady’s most famous images is of a dead horse.”

Bennett should not have had to write this piece. I spent a lot of time talking to people about the desperate situation of animals during Hurricane Sandy, and not one — literally, not a single person — suggested that the topic might be somehow inappropriate. I expect nobody even thought to raise that complaint.

And yet, when it’s Israel being shelled by murderers, you require a detailed argument, placing everything in historical perspective, to explain how these Israelis are just like us when it comes to behaving in human ways.

Consider this: humans, unless they are sociopaths, care about the plight of innocent creatures. Israelis care about the plight of innocent creatures since, oddly enough, they’re not a nation of sociopaths. Hence, Israelis — and I know a lot of people have a hard time with this — share certain attributes with actual humans.

This story is not really about the suffering of animals in the conflict. It is about the degree to which bigotry against Israel is simply a natural reflex in otherwise civilized people. This bigotry is so deeply ingrained in our society that even non-bigots, when confronted with it, require complex arguments to explain why they ought to be outraged.

War writing has always stressed the quotidian. The horrors of grievous injury and death are described, to be sure, but what often affects us most are details of ordinary lives quietly disrupted by the violence of history: the subtle but telling ways in which daily routines are augmented by misery.

So I have no problem with Sharon Udasin continuing to write, as she does on her regular beat, about ordinary people and their domestic creatures.

Eh, perhaps I’m just shallow. Of course I care about civilians traumatized and dying — I care about Israelis and Palestinians, equally — but clearly I’ve been spending too much of my time writing about animal welfare. I’ve lost perspective. In fact, I’ll confess to being doubly superficial. My trivial soul is bipartisan: like Udasin, I care about helpless animals on both sides of the border.

Nevertheless, I prefer my form of shallowness to Rory MacKinnon’s passionate, politically-engaged variety. Caring about animals reveals our humanity. And I still care about our humanity.

No need to wonder. Fundraisers are like Navy Seals: they have to be ready for every contingency. Boots are already on the ground, so to speak — virtually, at any rate. The HSUS has been ready to take your donations for days, in fact since before the storm hit: they put outwarnings and outstretched palms on October 29th.

Now, why is this so loathsome? Because — based on the HSUS’s performance during and after Katrina — if you care about starving creatures, you’re probably better off grinding your dollars into a nutritious paste and feeding them directly. This may not be the best use of dollars, but at least all of them would be guaranteed to reach the animals.

Malfeasance on the part of the HSUS made the Bush administration’s response to Katrina look like a masterpiece of charity and efficiency.

That said, their fundraising was spectacular: the sort of stuff that gets studied at Harvard Business School. While people and their pets were starving and drowning, Wayne Pacelle’s organization raised a truly gorgeous sum of money: something in the range of 34.6 million dollars. Which is admirable, when you consider what that kind of cash could have done for animals stranded and dying.

Unfortunately, “according to 2005 income tax records, the year of Katrina, the HSUS only dispersed $8.6 million in grants for its worldwide grants base including its major grants to Louisiana groups.”

“I can’t for the life of me see any issue here,” said Wayne Pacelle, CEO of the HSUS, when the Louisiana Attorney General announced an official inquiry into the misuse (well, disuse) of funds. So, let’s see whether we can see the issue, and perhaps explain it to him.

Kris Wartelle, the spokeswoman for then-acting Attorney General Charles C. Foti Jr., said that her office had “received complaints that even though the organization had raised millions of dollars, it had not done enough to reunite Katrina evacuees with their pets.”

It can’t have done enough. “Enough” would have meant spending the funds raised. Now, some detractors will tell you that they spent a truly paltry amount: the most vociferous are often connected to Richard Berman’s Center for Consumer Freedom, which is itself tied to the meat lobby.

The most reliable accounting comes from the HSUS itself, whose tax forms have been analyzed by AR-HR (Animal Rights or Human Responsibility), a group that makes a show of keeping a rigorous financial distance from the agriculture, fur and pet industries (and stresses that it has no relationship to the CCF). Whether you enjoy the show or not is up to you. AR-HR is not well-loved by animal rights organizations, because they’re opposed to any flavor of that stance. So, if you’re that way inclined, you’ll want to check their calculations carefully. The tax records are on their site. I have found nothing in their summaries and conclusions that contradicts the documents.

This group deduces: “Even by the numbers in the HSUS’ own article, the funds dispersed for the purposes of Katrina related activities total just under $18 million or 52% of the funds. The remaining amount, over $16.5 million dollars cannot be accounted for through HSUS provided documentation through investigation of its tax records.”

In humanspeak: Wayne’s people, by their own account, spent just over half of their Katrina loot on Katrina.

So what about the other 48%? That’s not exactly a trivial amount: 16.5 million dollars, donated by ordinary citizens expressly to help the animal population devastated by Katrina. Where is it?

We don’t know. And why don’t we know? Because the Attorney General of Louisiana stopped investigating.

The circumstances under which the Attorney General’s investigations came to an end are shrouded in mystery. The two least credible sources, when it comes to the HSUS, are the Center for Consumer Freedom, and Wikipedia. The Center for Consumer Freedom has, of course, a very deliberate agenda. The Wikipedia article about the HSUS has been subtly edited by John Schiff, a neutrality-compromised editor I’ve written about here and here. The truth lies somewhere between the CCF’s tarring and Schiff’s whitewashing, so let’s start with those two extremes.

The suggestion that the inquiry ended abruptly when the HSUS offered to build a relatively cheap shelter in Louisiana seems to have been planted in a local news report by David Martosko of the CCF. The HSUS certainly insists upon this: “This story emerged straight out of the playbook of the deceptively named Center for Consumer Freedom, a front-group for tobacco, alcohol and agribusiness interests.”

The deceptively named Humane Society of the United States feels pretty strongly here, and so does John Schiff, who doesn’t work for them but spends a huge amount of his time — without payment, of course — discrediting their enemies. Schiff has edited out any reference to the quid pro quo on Wikipedia. Schiff announces proudly that he has “removed unsourced, speculative claims.” He admonishes a less neutral editor: “Please use sources and neutral POV.”

After a bit of back and forth, John Schiff manages to insert the canonical unsourced sentence, “The investigation was subsequently closed with no finding of wrongdoing.” This remark, sans source, has stood the test of time. The words “with no finding of wrongdoing” briefly disappeared, yes, but Schiffreinserted them, not realizing, apparently, that they were now linked — irony of ironies — to a CCF document. (A document which, needless to say, supported this statement in no way whatsoever, and in fact said all sorts of truly rotten things about the HSUS.) All very puzzling.

This link was mangled – perhaps deliberately, perhaps not — so that it now reads “dead link,” despite being very much alive. (An editor named “Gobonobo” — whose name I adore — removed a single crucial underscore, thereby killing the link, and triumphantly declared it dead.)

To get to the bottom of this, we know that we’re going to have to search that vast unmapped territory that lies between CCF’s planted news story and Schiff’s unsourced assertion.

“Please use sources,” sniffs Schiff. So, let us use sources. And I promise a POV just as neutral as John Schiff’s.

Technically, “no finding of wrongdoing” is perhaps sort of correct. It sure implies, however, that the inquiry evaluated all of the evidence, decided that everything was just fine, and issued a statement to that effect. Doesn’t it?

That, sadly, is not what happened. What happened, inexplicably, is that the investigation simply ended. No, they didn’t find anything wrong, because they stopped looking. But you and I have found something wrong, simply by reading this very article: 16.5 million dollars remains unaccounted for.

Note that “no finding of wrongdoing” is not quite the same thing as “a finding of no wrongdoing.” Slippery business, language.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present: a source. It is the most reliable source I’ve found thus far when it comes to analyzing this sordid affair. Animal rights activists won’t be happy with it, and will excoriate me for relying upon it: the aforementioned AR-HR (Animal Rights or Human Responsibility). The numbers, note, aren’t from them — they’re from the HSUS’s own documents. I take no position on the organization itself, but their analysis of the numbers is sound. This is the final word, and it’s not all that satisfyingly final:

There can’t be much, if any, activity related to Katrina affected animals stated as the original purpose of the fundraising. If the remaining 48% of the money wasn’t been used for Katrina animals, then what has it been used for? Unfortunately, the inquiry was called off shortly after the announcement of the HSUS championed cockfighting bill being passed into law. As a result, these questions go unanswered and so they will remain.

There you have it. The money was never spent, and we don’t know why. The investigation into this was never completed. Why? We don’t know. Remember how the words “accountability” and “competence” started menacing the Bush administration, around the time of Katrina? Some say the administration never really recovered, after those words — punctuated often by question marks — just wouldn’t go away.

So how come the HSUS recovered? I mean, recovered sufficiently that they’re now asking you, with a big unembarrassed smile, to dig deep and give them funds so that they can take care of all those poor beleaguered puppies and kittens left stranded by big nasty Hurricane Sandy.

How did they survive not simply that debacle, but also such incidents as the Fay scandal, in which they raised money using the plight of a maimed pit bull that they hadn’t rescued, weren’t taking care of, and at one time would have killed? Why is that smile not even a touch sheepish, after their repulsive embrace of Michael Vick? Their new spokesman, who tortured dogs to death?

When it comes to weathering storms, in particular, they are a fundraising phenom. Wayne Pacelle’s impishly-misnamed organization has a solid track record when it comes to exploiting hurricanes, riding out the disgrace, and living to smile through the next one. They made off like bandits after Katrina, but they also got a nice publicity jolt from Hurricane Gustav.

The No Kill Advocacy Center’s Nathan Winograd tells the story:

In 2008, MuttShack Rescue completed a large-scale rescue of animals in New Orleans because of Hurricane Gustav. Instead of supporting the effort, HSUS claimed the rescue as their own. According to MuttShack: “[We] just completed the largest animal evacuation in the history of New Orleans. After its completion, HSUS drove their trucks up in front of the whole deal, shot some footage and has posted it [on their website] as their own rescue.”

Most excellent. And here we have Hurricane Sandy, another perfect storm.

Look: who am I to tell you how to spend your money. I will say this, however. If I had cash myself — I never do — and was concerned about animals left in peril by a vicious storm, I’d spend my money locally.

Much as I love the HSUS and their efforts during Gustav and Katrina — heck of a job, Wayne — I’d probably find some reputable local organization committed to No Kill: in New York, for instance, someone along the lines of Bobbi and the Strays or Urgent Pets on Death Row, Inc.

I wouldn’t want my money to be anything like the cash that those rescues in New Orleans never received, because it went to the slyly-named Humane Society of the United States.

Where it semi-evaporated.

Nathan Winograd is of course the leading voice for the No Kill movement. His campaign to end the unnecessary killing of shelter animals has inspired all sorts of slurs, one of which is that he is in the pocket of the puppy mill industry. Ironically, Winograd — a vegan who himself speaks in terms of animal rights — is a virulent critic of puppy mills. He is no friend to irresponsible breeders of any sort.

The breeder issue is a canard. The real reason for targeting Winograd is that he has demonstrated that three million healthy shelter animals are butchered every year without reason: this is a threat to shelter workers with blood on their hands, and — worse — goes contrary to the ideology of animal activists who believe in the extinction of domestic creatures.

The two most prominent animal rights figures revered by these activists — Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, and Wayne Pacelle of the HSUS (the Humane Society of the United States) — were once outspoken in their wish to rid the world of pets. Newkirk said to Newsday in February 1988: “In the end, I think it would be lovely if we stopped this whole notion of pets altogether.” Pacelle remarked in 1993: “In fact, I don’t want to see another dog or cat born.”

Both have since tempered their statements with “nuance,” but until recently their casual approach to killing pit bulls was fully evident, and Newkirk’s organization is still slaughtering pets at a sickening rate.

It is crucial to stress that neither PETA nor the HSUS is responsible for the threat against Nathan Winograd’s dog. In fact, none of the stalkers and trolls I shall describe below is officially allied to these organizations. Some of them, however — while carefully retaining plausible deniability — devote much of their spare time towards shilling for these two groups.

We are talking about vigilantes — not all of them sane — who feel that they are doing America’s beleaguered pets a good turn by threatening to kill one of them. The word “terrorist” is abused these days, but many are, in a very real sense, minor terrorists.

No, they are not threatening to fly airplanes into buildings. Nevertheless, as Winograd emphasizes: “threats of harm to a dog who is nearly blind, needs to be carried up the stairs, and can’t hold his bladder very well is beyond the pale.”

I’ve avoided writing about the worst of the anti-No-Kill thugs, because trolls and stalkers thrive on attention. It is perhaps time, however, to discuss just what kind of people are trying to undermine the effort to save shelter animals in the United States.

Those unfamiliar with the tenets of the No Kill movement might want to read my interview with Nathan Winograd. The essence of the program is easily summarized, and would seem pretty innocuous.

Every year, American animal shelters kill four million pets. Three million of these are perfectly healthy and adoptable. Moreover: statistics prove that there are more than enough adopters to take them in. In fact, there are over seven times as many adopters, nationwide, as there are animals requiring a home. No Kill is hard work, but simple to comprehend: it is a rigorous and proven protocol that prevents these animals from being killed unnecessarily. It protects them from the people who are supposed to be sheltering them. It keeps these creatures safe, and finds them homes.

And it has inspired an astonishing number of truly venomous enemies. Not all of these activists think clearly (to put it mildly), and many are conspiracy theorists: because Nathan Winograd has explained that pet overpopulation is a myth, they have decided that he must be in favor of puppy mills. Winograd stresses, however, that there are plenty of reasons to despise puppy mills without having to rely on a statistical untruth.

“Even if every shelter embraced the No Kill philosophy and the programs and services that make it possible, even if no dog or puppy was killed in a shelter again, we’d still want to close down puppy mills. You don’t have to believe in or perpetuate the lie of pet overpopulation to work on efforts to curtail harm to dogs in puppy mills. Puppy mills fuel inbreeding, provide minimal to no veterinary care, lack of adequate food and shelter, lack of human socialization, overcrowded cages, and cause neglect, abuse, and the killing of animals when they are no longer profitable. That is a distinct and separate harm from the fact that shelters are needlessly killing them.”

There is a much more obvious reason for hating No Kill, as I mentioned above, and as Winograd explains at greater length in the interview: the program is hard to swallow if you’re one of those shelter workers who has been responsible, throughout your career, for killing animals unnecessarily. No Kill assaults your conscience. It impugns your life. It is unbearable.

Hence you end up with people like the one threatening to kill Nathan Winograd’s dog. He described the posts, which were reported to Facebook and have since been removed: “One or two shelter workers posted photos of dogs they themselves killed, saying they killed the dog because someone is breeding somewhere.”

Contemplate this. A shelter worker – someone paid to keep defenseless animals safe — slaughtered dogs, in order to make a righteous statement: there are breeders out there, contributing to the pet population, so these shelter dogs must die.

Hence this shelter worker — a valiant guerilla taking a stand against the evil people who bring pets into this world — threatened to kill Nathan Winograd’s dogs. As an experiment: to see how that would make Winograd feel. (The threat was to kill his “dogs” — plural — but Winograd has only one dog, Pickles, since Topham died.) “They called me a ‘piece of shit’.”

My own encounters with these people have been ugly, but thus far come short of this kind of viciousness. Still, it is important to put these on the record. The harassment began when I wrote a series of article exposing the pet-killing practices of PETA, but has become significantly more virulent now that I amtaking on the hypocrisy of the HSUS.

As I say, the thugs I am dealing with are never on staff. They are volunteers — pro bono hit men — and they stridently deny that PETA and the HSUS are themselves responsible for the harassment. Technically speaking, they are correct. One of the most notorious, for instance — John Schiff — runs a website devoted entirely to attacking enemies of the HSUS. But he is not paid by the HSUS, so he can rightly claim “independence.”

I have written about Schiff before. He generally writes as “John Doppler Schiff”. Under the name “JohnDopp”, he attempted to have an article about me removed from Wikipedia.

Someone similar, whose identity I am still trying to determine, has been attempting to undermine sales of my novels on Amazon. First I discovered that a search on my name in the Kindle store brought up not simply my Young Adult novels, but also teen-focused pornography. (Anyone can suggest “similar” books on Amazon.)

A couple of days later, a reviewer named “donny random” described my YA novels as brimming over with R-rated material. This is not simply inaccurate, but comically inaccurate: my girlfriend is always giving me a hard time about how innocent they are, given their intended readership.

The literate Mr. Random left a more probing review of one of my novels for adults: he found the work “self-aggrandizing.” (It’s almost impossible, when you think about it, to write self-aggrandizing fiction; I have clearly broken new ground. I in fact feel aggrandized by his observation.) His reviews appeared almost simultaneously. What can I say: it’s always warming to see someone read his way through my complete oeuvre in a matter of hours.

These people aren’t generally very swift when it comes to covering their tracks. “JohnDopp” isn’t the most clever pseudonym, especially since he uses it widely elsewhere; nevertheless, he howled about the invasion of his privacy when I outed him to his fellow Wikipedia editors. My charming if random literary critic has a trail of Amazon reviews identifying all sorts of traits typical of a certain kind of animal activist: among other things, he is engaged in a pitched battle against his neighbor’s barking dogs.

It may be counterintuitive, but the hatred of either dogs or cats, or both, is a characteristic shared by many of these self-described animal activists.

The most disturbing is a woman who writes under various pseudonyms, but is generally identifiable by a number of features. She is often barely coherent, and almost always vulgar in a way that you don’t have to be Donny Random to find disturbing. She hates pit bulls venomously, and is equally unhinged in her bigotry towards cats: she believes that feral cats kill elderly people, and that litter boxes contribute to insanity.

Whether this woman is responsible for the current threat to kill Nathan Winograd’s dog I don’t know. It is certainly her style. And she has stalked Winograd for years.

Only recently has she taken to stalking me. She has, among other things, accused me of laundering money in Mexico for the American meat lobby. On her blog she has conversations between herself and an anonymous commenter (also herself), about my various crimes. She is fixated on my geography — that special kind of bigot who assumes that any activity south of the border must be criminal. Apparently I run puppy mills when I’m not busy laundering money. Oh, and she seems to think that Canadians eat dog-meat. (If you add two plus two, it’s clear that I run puppy mills in Mexico to keep Canadian chefs supplied.)

All very humorous, until you remember what this is really about: it is an effort to discredit a movement that would end the killing of millions of innocent creatures.

You will encounter, in fact, an entire grotesque community of these people on the Web: an extended Addams Family. These pet killers — most of them bent on the extinction of domestic animals — like to paint themselves as the moderates in this debate: No Kill is “radical.” They arrive as a pseudonymous gang whenever No Kill is proposed, and reinforce each other’s slander.

It can be difficult to separate out the speakers, since most have at least a couple of sock puppets. They almost all use the same language: Nathan Winograd is referred to as “Wino”; No Kill advocates are described as “whores” who are “pimped out” by breeders and meat lobbyists.

In this age of cyber-bullying, this has become an urgent question: how do you counter these people?

We tried a parody blog, echoing the woman who insists that feral cats kill the elderly. It was a pretty simple parody, along the lines of what Saturday Night Live did to Sarah Palin: we mostly just quoted her own words verbatim. Unfortunately, it only served to drive her to new levels of strangeness: she began babbling about identity theft and meetings with the FBI.

We set up a No Kill Awareness Fund, and named it after JohnDopp. This has proven more successful: it hasn’t shut him down, but it clearly embarrasses him.

These are humorous responses to ridiculous people, however, and they are hardly appropriate to the latest threats: how do you deal with self-styled “activists” whose idea of helping animals is to threaten to kill someone’s family pet?

No, nobody is taking aim at Nathan Winograd’s life, or mine, but the threat — if you love dogs — is vile: as he points out, if they killed his dog Pickles it would cause his family “unimaginable pain.”

The assault on me and my books is nothing by comparison, and would not particularly bother me, except that it is evidence that I am being targeted, obsessively, by a truly vicious group of people. I am far enough away that my dogs are safe. (And it would not be paranoia to worry if I lived close to, say, PETA’s headquarters in Norfolk Virginia.)

If you care about animals, this situation matters. Deeply. If anything were to happen to one of my dogs, I’d be suicidal. And the threat against Nathan Winograd’s ailing pet is as vile as any cult tactic I’ve encountered. This to a man who has been described, by many people — sane, decent people, who have a true picture of him — as a modern day St. Francis.

Call me hopelessly naive and softhearted, but I would lay my life down to prevent these people from killing this one nearly-blind, incontinent dog: the family pet belonging to a man whose sole crime in this world is that he puts all of his time towards ending the yearly slaughter of three millions shelter animals.

Never mind that it arrived 3,000 years ago.

The Xoloitzcuintli (pronounced show-low-eetz-QUEENT-lee), has had a crucial role in the history of this continent. It has been worshipped. It has been eaten. The same people who worshipped it also ate it, which is just wrong, but the Aztecs were noted for doing things we don’t always appreciate.

If you lived in Mesoamerica before Dante was imported, the Xolo was the sacred creature you looked to for guidance through the underworld after death. (If you were a Xolo, and you knew that the guy you were guiding enjoyed dining on your relatives, I expect you’d lead him somewhere truly special.) This bald canine Virgil can be found in pre-Columbian art, and — as I have noted — tangled in our duvet every morning.

The bed is in fact a traditional place for a Xolo: when not being worshipped or eaten, it was employed as a bed warmer. The expression “three dog night” refers to a night so cold that you require three hairless dogs in your bed to keep you warm. (This may be apocryphal, but I want it to be true, therefore it is.)

The Xoloitzcuintli is an ancient breed, yes, and stranger even than the other hairless dogs of the world. Unlike the Chinese Crested, the American Hairless Terrier, and the Peruvian Inca Orchid, the Xolo came into being without human intervention: There is no evidence that it was bred for baldness. Some insist that it wandered across the Bering Strait with the ancestors of the Olmec; the more accepted theory is that the breed arose spontaneously in North America, thousands of years ago, as a bald mutation of an indigenous canine. That’s right: The blind Darwinian process somehow gave rise to the world’s most gorgeous dog.

Now, there are some who would disagree with this aesthetic judgment. Psychopaths, for instance: They do not find the Xolo an overwhelmingly fetching creature. Hernán Cortés — an unpleasant conquistador — hated the Mexican Hairless, and attempted to eradicate the breed. People like you and me, however — who are not rapacious colonial serial killers — recognize that this is the most elegant dog in existence, rivaled only by the Italian Greyhound.

Our Xolo, Snorkel Louise, has had a difficult time expressing her peerless beauty. She lives in the same house as Pixel, our Italian Greyhound, who is something of a celebrity in Oaxaca. We have in fact found random photos of Pixel all over the web, snapped by tourists who were captivated by her radiance while passing through town. Pixel’s mom was a Mexican champion, and her dad a world champion: That’s a lot to live up to.

On the other hand, the greatest aesthetes in the nation have recognized the superiority of the Xolo. The near-extinct creature’s fortunes were reversed partially because Frida Kahlo decided to make them a prominent part of her menagerie, and was photographed posing with them by the great Mexican photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo.

(Oaxacan Artist Gabriela León with her Xolo)

These days, in fact, many of Oaxaca’s most important artists own Xolos descended from a single bloodline. Snorkel Louise may or may not be part of this family, but most of the dogs in Oaxaca are probably cousins. This is not to say that the type is in-bred: The breed is perhaps the healthiest in existence — with no known hereditary illnesses — and regularly lives to the age of 20. It has a mystical reputation for spreading health, too: Our landlady in Oaxaca was thrilled that we’d brought home a famously therapeutic dog.

At the moment there are less than a 1,000 Xoloitzcuintlis in America. Expect that number to change. With Giorgio Armani’s star turn at this year’s Westminster, the Xolo is no longer a mythical exotic; and the rare breed’s survival is pretty much guaranteed, for the simple reason that you are going to adopt one. While any responsibly-bred Xolo can be considered a rescue — this creature really did come very close to disappearing — there are in fact abandoned Xolos urgently in need of adoption: The Xolo Rescue League, headquartered in Alberta, coordinates this crucial business across Canada and the United States.

The Xoloitzcuintli comes in two varieties — hairless and coated — and three sizes: standard, miniature, and toy. Baldness is prized, of course. Snorkel is a hairless toy, as are most of the Xolos we meet in Oaxaca. When you choose yours (and you do want one), be aware that you can find one of these exquisite beasts as large as a Border Collie, should you decide that hairlessness ought to be the dominant theme in your household.

And why shouldn’t it be?

***

(Gabriela León Wearing a Xolo and One of Her Pieces)

(Artist Gabriela León with Xolo Puppies)