UPDATE: Anti-gun nuts, like Mayor Bloomberg, are screaming like plucked little piggies — “Wee, wee, wee! All the way home.” Some of New York City’s most liberal Democrat candidates joined their uber-liberal out-going billionaire mayor rending their garments and gnashing their teeth

The NRA, in the person of it’s chief spokesman and Executive V.P. Wayne LaPierre, has shown that it’s nobody’s lap dog waiting for somebody like Mike Bloomberg to say "Roll over and play dead" and then rub his belly and say, “He’s such a good boy! Yes, he’s such a good boy!”  —  Instead the leadership of the four million strong national association, whose members generally favor maintaining ALL of our gun rights, perked up, and barked a firm warning about some of the real causes of violence in our society; and with specificity and clarity, how best to deal with the threat of gun violence in our schools --- with properly trained and vetted armed guards

Perhaps there was too  much certainty and hubris in the vast echo-chamber world of America's liberal elites that they really did expect that even the National Rifle Association would finally have to come to heel, and be docile and compliant. Some in their loftiness probably thought that even Wayne LaPierre would have to show proper respect to the week-long eulogies of the vast Greek Chorus of the national media or to the masterful and magisterial maundering  of certain especially sensitive and enlightened leaders about much needed gun-control in this well-managed and much-shared moment of national grief.  The NRA's Friday press conference and the speech by Wayne LaPierre showed how wrong they all were.

According to Colin Campbell, a local Brooklyn pundit, who posts political commentary for a city-wide blog:  “In an announcement surprising many political observers, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre came out swinging against both the media and a host of other entities in the wake of the recent elementary school massacre in Connecticut. In [Frday’s] extensive address, Mr. LaPierre further proposed immediately putting an armed security guard in every single school in order to guard students against future shootings. Needless to say, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has become one of the nation’s chief  voices against the NRA’s lobbying efforts, was unimpressed.”

As Colin knows from some of my comments here and over beers in various venues, I usually find his commentary to be thoughtful, thought provoking and useful for many of my purposes. His 12/21/12 post, “BACKFIRE  —   Mayor Bloomberg Was Unpersuaded by the NRA’s Press Conference” [http://politicker.com/2012/12/mayor-bloomberg-was-unpersuaded-by-n-r-a-s-press-conference/ ]  was certainly no exception to any of that. However, I’m sure that Mr. Campbell knows equally well that there are lots of things, big, small and in between, upon which I do disagree with him. One such item of disagreement is over the farcical notion that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was “unimpressed” by the NRA response, in general, and Mr. LaPierre’s speech, in particular. The minuscule media mogul and municipal minister of mischief, thought enough about the masterful gunman’s remarks to respond as if the NRA leader's speech had been LaPierre's  gauntlet snapped smartly across the  regal Bloomberg cheek.

Mr Campbell reports that the New York Mayor said this:  “The NRA’s Washington leadership has long been out of step with its members, and never has that been so apparent as this morning... Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe. Leadership is about taking responsibility, especially in times of crisis. Today the NRA’s lobbyists blamed everyone but themselves for the crisis of gun violence. While they promote armed guards, they continue to oppose the most basic and common sense steps we can take to save lives – not only in schools, but in our movie theaters, malls, and streets. Enough. As a country, we must rise above special interest politics.”  Those words were  like the mayor's quickly rubbing his smarting cheek, taking up LaPierre’s glove, and calling for LaPierre’s and Bloomberg’s Seconds to make the appropriate arrangements.

In the same post, Campbell also mentioned the pathetic “me toos...” of three 2013 city-wide Democratic Party aspirants, Comptroller John Liu, Public Advocate Bill deBlasio and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who feigned the routinely lame liberal outrage that one might expect in times like these. What neither Liu, deBlasio, Quinn or Bloomberg even attempted to do was address  Wayne LaPierre’s main rhetorical point   —   “THE ONLY THING THAT STOPS A BAD GUY WITH A GUN IS A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN.”   Until people like Liu, deBlasio, Quinn, Bloomberg, Schumer, Gillibrand and Carolyn McCarthy can rebut that one line, remarks like Bill deBlasio’s, “Only the NRA would have the audacity to claim the solution to horrific school violence is to put more guns in our schools. Through divestment, through tougher laws and through a national movement, we are going to take the gun lobby head-on and win..”  will be seen as the empty rhetoric that it is.