PETA vs. NRA

The National Rifle Association (NRA)  is holding a news conference in Washington
today and at Sandy Hook Elementary School,  PETA will be right there to steal the NRA’s
thunder—and, hopefully,  its Bushmaster
AR-15 rifles. In a protest outside the NRA’s news conference, PETA is calling for
a ban on shooting all living beings—including
the millions of animals
hunters blast away annually for “recreation”. 

Not much is known yet about the
Sandy Hook shooter’s motives, but all the young men involved in previous
shootings at Columbine, Pearl, Mississippi, and other schools “practiced” their crimes on
animals. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, 11-year-old Andrew Golden took the hunting guns
belonging to his grandfather—who had taught Andrew to hunt—and used them to
ambush his fellow students, killing four girls and one teacher. In her book,
Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman writes that Golden
and his accomplice, Mitchell Johnson, “dressed in camouflage clothing,
exactly as Andrew did when he went hunting. … From across the field, their
classmates and teachers seemed less like the human beings they went to school
with than like quarry to be killed .”

“There is nothing reasonable about
taking pleasure in killing other living beings—any other living beings.
And the hunting of human beings is just another vile form of hunting,” writes
PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk in a blog on the Huffington Post.
“Let’s start prying the guns out of all those hot trigger-happy hands and
really, truly work for peace on Earth for all living beings.”

A man quoted in the New York Times said that
he uses his AR-15 rifle, the same type of gun used in Newtown, to “relieve
stress” by blowing small animals to smithereens on his farm. “Relieving stress”
by killing animals—or beating spouses or kids—is a red flag, one that is being
waved in fields and woods every hunting season.