Defining the NRA

I will admit, birding wasn’t the only thing I did while I was in Klamath Falls.  One of the upsides (or downsides, depending how you look at it) of staying in a motel instead of a campground is the presence of on-demand wi-fi.  I didn’t have to pack up my ‘puter and set up on a picnic table as close as possilbe to the nearest dwelling with an unprotected wireless internet connection, like I did last September at Big Eddy.  When I hit the room after a day on the Refuge, all I had to do was dump my camera stuff on the bed, open up my laptop and voila—the world was at my fingertips.

Lately, “the world” has included an embarrassing addiction to NPR stories covering the gun control debate, and the comment spaces provided below them.  What’s the allure?  I don’t know.  It’s like being hooked on a really bad serial drama.  You cringe and facepalm and beat your head on the desk at the inanity of it all, but you just can’t change the channel.  Those guys are hardcore.  They have their well-rehearsed list of talking points and rebuttals.  I’ve waged some toe-to-toe comment throwdowns with some of the worst offenders, but I don’t know why I bother.   They never color outside the lines of their collection of  “facts,” and if a pointed reasonable comment to which they have NOT got a rehearsed answer is presented by someone in the opposition, it’s treated like dead air   

Kind of reminds me of the presidential debates.

So there I sat, in the singularly uncomfortable motel chair with my feet on the identically uncomfortable motel ottoman, my Compaq in my lap, thrusting and parrying with gun lovers from across the US.  I wouldn’t call it entertaining.  It was more like the fast-track to a peptic ulcer.  The only good thing to come of it is that I have become familiar with the 21^st-century gun lobby catechism.  And if you give too much weight to this very vocal minority (as is the wont of our intrepid American media) it will absolutely make you fear for the president, the Republic, the Constitution, and your own life.  Even put in the proper perspective, the most rabid gun-rights activists constitute an alarmingly well-indoctrinated group of fanatics who have no fear of throwing around threats that range from sedition to treason and all points in between.  I’m all for freedom of speech, but when it comes armed with an AR-15 and a 30-round magazine, something is distinctly out of whack.

I could go for pages and pages with diatribes against the gun lobby in general and the NRA in particular.  And I think I might just do that, in future posts.  But the reason I signed on here today was to issue a little challenge to my friends/readers/commenters.  I didn’t want to post this directly on Facebook, because…well, I have friends who, shall we say, wouldn’t appreciate the humor.  Anyway, as I sat contemplating the idea of a series of posts on gun control, I got to fooling around with the letters “N R A”, attempting to assign those letters to words which more truthfully, to my mind, described the mission of the organization bearing that acronym. 

I chewed on this for quite awhile this morning, came up with things like “Nutty Raving Anarchists” and “New Ridiculous Accusations.”  Neither of which is particularly noteworthy, but you get the picture.  Eventually I came up with one I really, really liked, but I’m keeping that a secret until the end of the challenge.

Post a comment with YOUR alternate meaning of NRA.  Then we’ll take a vote for the favorite.  Winner gets a prize TBD.  AND anyone guessing or independently matching MY personal brainstorm will get a prize as well.  Put your thinking caps on, now.  Ready?  Go!