Remember when last month NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre talked about the,”massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country”? Yeah, I’m thinking he was a little off. Sadly, paranoid gun talk and fear is how the NRA recruits new members, but his whole the “government wants our guns” myth is being shattered by the real non violent movement that started with Occupy Wall Street.

Hey, remember when the Tea Party folks were excising their “right to bear arms” by showing up where the President was speaking strapped and even went as far as marching on Washington with their guns? And remember when the secret service and police tear gassed, harassed, beat and arrested those Tea Party protestors? You don’t? That’s because it never happened. If the government was really about taking away guns they had a perfect opportunity to crack down on a group of obviously delusional individuals, packing heavy artillery, and showing up in areas of high security. If President Obama wanted to hatch some “conspiracy” he had a perfect opportunity at that time.

Ironically, the group of people that was targeted for brutality by the police is a group so dangerous they’ve been referred to as “hippies”. Yep, I’m talking about the Occupy movement, springing up in every major city across the country. Even though they are unarmed and peaceful and unarmed, police have used such heavy handed tactics that in Oakland, California they violated their own agreement limiting the use of militarized weapons to disperse crowds. Peaceful people occupying space, working together to feed and clothe one another is seen as more threatening, than a group of angry pistol packing Tea Partiers yelling about taking their country back.

The worse part of NRA VP LaPierre’s ridiculous assertion is they’re to a audience who are not big on fact checking and truth finding. Sadly, that’s the type of dangerous rhetoric that lead to 3 police officers being shot a killed here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Richard Poplawskii, the gunman who was convicted and sentenced to death, according to his friend Edward Perkovic, said Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon”. Sound familiar?

 

This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program. The fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.