Gun nut Rick Perry reaches a new low
Donald Trump is right about one thing — former Texas Gov. Rick Perry believes simply wearing glasses will make him look smarter. The problem is that Mr. Perry isn’t any smarter than he was four years ago when his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination died after his bungle in a debate, when he forgot the name of the third government agency he pledged to dismantle. (“Sorry. Oops,” he said.)
While I wouldn’t go as far as Mr. Trump in insisting that every candidate be administered an IQ test as a prerequisite to being allowed on the debate stage with the cluster of Republicans vying for the nomination this time around, there’s little doubt Mr. Perry has gotten over any natural aversion he may have once had to looking ridiculous.
Last week, yet another of America’s Second Amendment Absolutists took his right to bear arms to a movie theater. In Lafayette, La., John Russell “Rusty” Houser killed two women and wounded nine other people before taking his own life as the cops moved in. A violent wife abuser and racist Internet troll, Houser, who was unemployed, left behind a booby-trapped house, but no clues as to why he chose to open fire on customers whose only crime was being in the mood for a romantic comedy.
Like James Holmes, who was recently convicted of mass murder in the 2012 Colorado movie shootings, Houser bought his guns and ammo legally despite a denial of his request for a concealed carry permit. The gun industry and its sycophants in Congress don’t believe mental illness should necessarily be a barrier to gun ownership. That would leave too much money on the table in a nation where a lot of Americans would, let’s face it, fit the definition of “certifiable.”
In response to the Lafayette massacre, Mr. Perry, who continues to poll in the low single digits with those who remember him as being too dumb to be president in 2012, displayed his usual acumen for saying the absolute wrong thing. “These concepts of gun-free zones are a bad idea,” he said. “I think that you allow citizens of this country — who have been appropriately trained, appropriately backgrounded, know how to handle and use firearms — to carry them.”
When Mr. Perry was a governor, he used to go jogging on the dusty roads around Austin with a lasersighted .380 Ruger, just in case a coyote or rattlesnake crossed his path.
“I believe that, with all my heart, that if you have citizens who are well-trained, and particularly in these places that are considered gun-free zones, that we can stop that type of activity, or stop it before there’s as many people who are impacted as we saw in Lafayette,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Gun-free zones are generally understood to be houses of worship, universities, theaters, restaurants and public schools. Mr. Perry thinks a theater full of patrons who aren’t strapped amounts to an insult to the Second Amendment. To his credit, Mr. Tapper didn’t break out into startled chortles at the prospect of a movie theater full of Texans shooting at each other in the dark.
When Mr. Perry said that merely enforcing current gun laws would be better than making access to guns more difficult, he was too intellectually dishonest to acknowledge that the NRA and the gun industry consider the Swiss cheese gun laws now in effect too onerous and are constantly suing to have them overturned.
But Mr. Perry’s obtuseness is rivaled by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s initial response to a reporter’s question about whether America should re-evaluate its gun laws in light of yet another massacre. “Now is not the time to talk gun control,” Mr. Jindal said, whipping out the favorite mantra of NRA-spooked politicians the day after the shootings.
Mr. Jindal, a 2016 GOP rival who happens to be doing even worse than Mr. Perry in the polls, is smart enough to know that there’s never a good time to talk gun control for a conservative politician. Still, on Sunday Mr. Jindal took the uncharacteristic risk of stating the obvious: Houser should not have been able to buy a gun because he had already been involuntarily committed a few years ago but continued to act erratically. Yet he was able to walk into a pawnshop in Alabama and buy the gun he used to murder two and injure nine.
If only Houser had been a Muslim trying to buy a gun at a “Muslim-free zone” gun shop like the one that recently popped up in Florida in response to the Chattanooga recruiting base shooting.
You can never be too crazy, hateful or mentally impaired to buy a gun if you’re a citizen — but you can definitely be too “Muslim-y.”
It may be a religious test, but America has to have some standards when it comes to the Second Amendment.