Meanwhile, the Gun Lobby Continues to Impress

Fresh from the public relations coup of “Guns Across America” for Martin Luther King’s birthday, and the not at all crazy plans for secession and armed revolt, we now get the nauseating spectacle of gun zealots heckling the father of a victim of the Sandy Hook slaughter.

Update: Some readers are insisting that if you watch the full clip the gun lobbyists are exonerated:

Actually, watching the full clip, what still comes through to me, loud and clear, is the complete emotional cluelessness of the people barking out their replies to this poor man. I don’t think it’s really far off the mark to describe their response as heckling, but at the very least it takes Rain Man levels of emotional and social inability to fail so completely to grasp when to argue and when to keep one’s peace and not behave as these idiots did. The people responding to this grieving father, speaking out of the depths of his agony, seem to be incapable of perceiving him as anything other than another obstacle to be struck down with the same pre-recorded rhetoric as ever. They should have just remained silent and let this man have his say. But they just couldn’t. shut. up. Nauseating.

Upper Update: But, but, MSNBC *edited* the clip! Don’t I even *care*? Sort of. MSNBC shouldn’t have edited the clip. But this is sort of like saying somebody tinkered with the Zapruder film to make Oswald look *really* bad. I think the unedited clip makes these people look bad without MSNBC’s ministrations. People seem to disagree with me on that point, though I can’t fathom why. So, do I think it bad that MSNBC (or whoever) fiddled with the clip. Yeah. But I think that being OUTRAGED! OUTRAGED!!!! about it is is mostly sound and fury to distract from the fact that, even unedited, the clip does not cover the shouters in glory. They should have been smart, let the emotionally charged moment be what it was and, if they really had some burning need to speak, waited till later and done so. This was a deeply dumb way to respond to this poor man.