Guns

Rambo vs. the NRA

What do the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing, the Jewish Labor Committee, Sean Connery and the St. Louis Rams professional football team have in common?

All appear on the National Rifle Association’s list of “anti-gun” organizations, companies and celebrities. (In NRA-speak, “anti-gun” means support for any new regulations on gun purchase or ownership.)

Prominent on the list is Johnny Rambo himself, Sylvester Stallone, who supports a ban on assault weapons. He made the entirely reasonable point:

Who … needs an assault weapon? Like really, unless you’re carrying out an assault. … You can’t hunt with it. … Who’s going to attack your house, a (expletive) army?”

In other gun-related news:

— Asked by an interviewer if he had ever fired a gun, President Obama said he does skeet shooting at Camp David. For some reason this drew skepticism from a number of people, including Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, who decided that the best way to serve the good people of Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District was to appear on CNN and suggest the president was lying.

“If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this? Why have we not seen photos? Why hasn’t he referenced this at any point in time?” Blackburn said Monday on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

In response to the “skeeters,” the White House released a photo of Obama skeet shooting last August.

I don’t dare to Google, but I’m sure some have already asserted that it’s a Photoshop job, that it’s not really Obama, or that Obama was secretly transported to a summery setting so the photo could be staged.

— More tragically, a former Navy SEAL sniper was one of two men shot dead at a Texas gun range, allegedly by a former Marine.