Column: NRA, LaPierre selling snake oil

• A single cop in Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School would have been grossly outmatched by Lanza's firepower.
• Sure it makes sense, as LaPierre suggested, to do something about a popular culture that promotes violence.
• But the solution to this problem is more complex than what he acknowledged.

Like a snake oil salesman hawking a questionable elixir, Wayne LaPierre stepped onto the public stage last week and brashly offered a surefire remedy for this nation's rash of schoolhouse massacres.

"The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection," said the longtime CEO of the National Rifle Association. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

LaPierre's prescription for ending this violence came seven days after Adam Lanza, 20, stormed into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., firing a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle capable of squeezing off several bullets a second from high-capacity clips that held 30 rounds each. Lanza wore body armor and also carried a Glock and Sig Sauer handguns. He hauled enough ammunition into the building to kill all 450 children who attended the school. Sadly, Lanza managed to slaughter 20 kids and six adults during his 10-minute rampage before killing himself as cops closed in on him.

The way to give schools "absolute protection" from this kind of murder spree, LaPierre said, is to station a police officer in every one of this nation's schools – all 135,000 of them. But most police are armed with Glock pistols that carry 13 – 15 bullets in a clip. A single cop in Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School would have been grossly outmatched by Lanza's firepower.

More than anything else, LaPierre is obsessed with protecting what he believes to be the absolute right of Americans to "bear arms." His calls for putting a cop in every school deflects attention away from a key part of any comprehensive solution to the violence that wracked the Newtown school: the need for a nationwide ban on the sale and ownership of semiautomatic assault-style rifles and military-type, high-capacity ammunition clips.

Sure it makes sense, as LaPierre suggested, to do something about a popular culture that promotes violence -- especially in video games and movies. But without imposing some reasonable limits of the kind of weapons that people can legally possess, that'll be just a half measure.

It is believed that Lanza had some kind of mental disability. To be sure, he suffered from the anti-social sickness that turns far too many people in this country into cold-blooded killers. I suspect Lanza had a violent inclination that was prodded by the way popular culture promotes violence in this society. But like President Obama, I'm convinced the solution to this problem is more complex than what LaPierre acknowledged.

"There's no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence in our society," Obama said during a White House news conference five days after the Newtown school massacre. "We're going to need to work on making access to mental health care at least as easy as access to a gun. We're going to need to look more closely at a culture that all too often glorifies guns and violence. ...

"But the fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing. …The good news is there's already a growing consensus for us to build from. A majority of Americans support banning the sale of military-style assault weapons. A majority of Americans support banning the sale of high-capacity ammunition clips. A majority of Americans support laws requiring background checks before all gun purchases."

But not LaPierre. The NRA leader wants us to believe that introducing more guns into the nation's schools won't cause the next murderous intruder to show up with even deadlier weapons. That's the huckster in him talking.

Let's hope most Americans don't buy his snake oil.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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