The Guns of Never Own
Rachel Maddow has an utterly fascinating, remarkable sequence last night. I can't embed it here, but I can post the video she showed and the two others related to it that didn't air. And explain what it's all about.
The short version is that two high-ranking gun advocates -- one, a former president of the NRA, and the other the author of a book called "the bible of the NRA" -- were invited by a conservative high high, James Madison Academy in Las Vegas, to give commencement addresses on behalf of guns.
Before the schedule event began, they were asked to do a dress rehearsal in order to get the sound check correct and other technical matters set. They did so, in front of the 3,044 empty chairs, and it was recorded. Later, they were told that there was a threat to the event, and it got cancelled.
Here's the thing.
There is no James Madison Academy. The school and its website were all fake. A simple background check by either man or their staffs would have discovered this, easily. Rather, the scam was set up by an anti-gun violence group, Change the Ref -- a group created by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin had been killed in the Parkland massacre. And the 3,044 empty seats represented the number of high school students who lost their lives to guns this past year and would not be graduated.
At the end of Maddow's segment, she had Manuel Oliver on as a guest. She asked him if he had seen any change in his efforts that he considered hopeful. He had a wonderful answer. He said -- let me explain why I do. I am on your show tonight because of this event that we set up. I am not on for the usual reason, after a gun massacre. So, this means that we are controlling the dialogue, and that's important.
(Important, too, is that President Biden and Attorney General Garland yesterday gave speeches where they outlined a new, Zero Tolerance gun policy -- where any gun dealer who willfully ignores background check laws just once will lose their license to sell guns. That would seem to take away a major argument gun advocates might otherwise try to make. But it's hard to argue with, "They were allowed to sell guns, but lost their license because they willfully broke the law. We are enforcing the law.")
I also liked a comment that Manuel Oliver made, that he wasn't concerned with how either of the two gun advocates felt about being scammed. His only concern was about the people who lost their lives and saving the lives of others.
By the way, the name "Change the Ref" comes from a comment that Joaquin Oliver had made to his father about playing basketball. It referred to when the referee seemed to be making bad calls that were weighting the results, and all he wanted was for the game to be played fairly.
(There's also an unexpected side note to this. After watching the segment on The Rachel Maddow Show, I called my friend Myles Berkowitz -- who I mention here periodically -- because I knew he had become friendly with one the parents at Parkland, my recollection was Fred Gutterman, and so I thought he'd be interested and would want to watch the MSNBC rerun three hours later. As I was telling him the story, and mentioned "Parkland," Myles interrupted me. "What, is this my Manny??" It turns out that I had it wrong, the father -- and mother -- he'd gotten to know was Manuel and Patricia Oliver It was after Manuel had made a devastating "parody" of a Louis C.K. video making the rounds where the comedian was making jokes at the expense of the Parkland tragedy. Myles wrote to the family about, they stayed in touch and later met and became friendly, even working with Manny to get him to speak at his daughter's school. And Myles says that they are smart, wonderful, talented people who he is not remotely surprised did this.)
Here first is the third video that Change the Ref put out, which didn't air last night, but it actually explains the scam pretty well.
This is the first video, which is what Rachel Maddow did air on her show. Know that it (and the last video) are difficult to watch for the audio they edit in. But it also makes it profoundly more powerful.
And this is the second of Change the Ref's three videos, which also did not air last night on The Rachel Maddow Show.
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