Prattfall

Update 18/12/2012

Gun Owners of America T-shirt, via ThinkProgress.

Pencils aren't a very efficient way of misspelling words, or spoons of putting on pounds—I'll bet you five bucks that T-shirt model mainly used his fingers, and look at those love-handles; he's way ahead of O'Donnell girthwise. Cars are another matter: no, they don't make people drive drunk, but you can't drive drunk without one, and that really weakens your prospects of killing anybody on your way home from a bar. Imagine if the bartender were empowered to assess your level of impairment and if need be confiscate your keys. There'd be a fleet of bicycles outside so you could kill yourself if you were really determined, but killing anybody else would be practically impossible. I'd vote for it, plus adequate public transport.

As to the Gun Owners of America, and their aptly named executive director Larry Pratt, who responded to the Connecticut shooting with a statement beginning as follows:

Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. 

No doubt if Adam Lanza's mom had been allowed to take just one of her semi-automatic pistols to work that morning she could have shot her son dead before he harmed any kids. Oh, wait, he'd already killed her with one of them off campus. But there weren't any laws at all stopping her from shooting him at home, so what on earth went wrong? A confusing time for the Gun Owners of America, I guess.

Update:

I just learned that Nancy Lanza did not teach at the Sandy Hook Elementary School; that was just one of the many stupid rumors infecting the discourse on Friday. To the Gun Owners of America, I suppose that just proves that guns don't kill people—sons of unemployed single mothers kill people, except when they don't. On the Prat, see Charles Pierce.