Dumb Ass Hall of Fame: Charles Cotton

“Charles Cotton says exactly what you’d expect, yet the speed and heartlessness of it is still startling.” –Esquire Magazine.
It seemed fitting to revive my old “Dumb Ass Hall of Fame” feature from the early days of this blog, after NRA Board Member and Texas (of course) Attorney Charles Cotton pretty much forced me to do so.

It was Cotton who, in the hours following South Carolina white supremacist Dylann Roof’s execution murders of 9 worshipers at a bible study in the historic  Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, proclaimed that the deaths were not the fault of the twist gunman, but of one of the victims.  In Cotton’s view, the late South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney was responsible for both his own murder but also of that of his eight companions.

“[Pinckney] voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”

I don’t have a problem with guns–but I think, if you’re like the guy in line at the Dairy Queen two weeks ago with the big chrome Colt holstered on your waist, you probably need way more attention than your mommy ever gave you at home.  I do have a problem with the NRA–a gun manufacturer’s lobby that pretends to be a populist organization, the ultimate goal of which is to sell more products.  The NRA seeds fear, contempt, hysteria and resentment as a way to galvanize it’s supporters, despite that fact that while the future availability of certain weapons has been greatly reduced, no government–conservative, liberal, or whatever–in the recent history of the USA had made even the slightest move to take guns from law abiding citizens.