Setting Back Any Setbacks, The NRA Once More Succeeds In Further Advancing Its Policies In The Wake of The Parkland Student-Led Protests (or Mr. Novak Gets His Gun!)

Just as the NRA wanted it: Mr. Novak gets his gun

Things looked bad for the NRA (National Rifle Association) after the Parkland Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings: 17 people in six minutes of AR-15 assault rifle gunfire mayhem, the majority, 14 of them, students between the ages of 14 and 18.

This time the school shooting was followed by students organizing themselves in eloquent protest.  The very conservative Republican Florida state legislature and governor even responded by passing some new limitations on gun ownership in the state.  On March 9, Republican Governor Rick Scott signed legislation sent to him by the legislature raising the minimum age for buying rifles in Florida to 21, establishing waiting periods and background checks, banning bump stocks and barring some potentially violent or mentally unstable people from possessing guns.  At the urging of the NRA the bill also provided for the arming of teachers with guns.

Originally the Republican legislators were working to pass legislation to require that teachers be armed in every school.  Not giving the NRA exactly what it wanted with respect to its long-standing hope to arm teachers, the bill, as passed, funded (with $67 million*) a voluntary, not a mandatory a “marshal” program that schools could opt into to equip and train certain teachers, including counselors, coaches and librarians, but not full-time classroom teachers.

(*  These funds will be rerouted from school library expenditures.)

A setback for the NRA?  The NRA doesn’t get scared in such situations; they just get their agenda advanced.  If all it takes is a few extra weeks of waiting, in the end they get what they want, and then some.

The Florida legislature is revisiting the legislation that was passed in order to eliminate the recently enacted gun restrictions while significantly beefing up and making mandatory the program to arm teachers.  As revised, almost every teacher in every Florida school will now be required to carry a firearm while on duty.

“The commotion and hubbub about these things just needed to die down a bit for people to think clearly,” said NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker.  “Those protests are now so last week,” she added.   But while the NRA was biding time waiting for things to die down, they were working to bring the press to heel, while feeding it a negative view of the opposition.

Women who speak for the NRA: Dana Loesch and Susan LaPierre

NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, like Ms. Baker, not only vilified the media for reporting the Parkland school shooting and others just for the sake of ratings, she said that the Parkland students, as young as they were, were not qualified to make anti-gun statements.  “These students are mere babies,” she said, “and when they criticize guns and the right to bear arms just because of a few dead friends, they are being cry babies.  At that age, unless you, yourself already own a gun, know how to use it and understand our interpretation of the Second Amendment, you are not qualified to speak on the subject.” 

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Perhaps even more effective than portraying the opposition negatively, the NRA swung Florida legislators’ votes by unveiling a new PR campaign with which they promise to soon be flooding the airwaves.  The NRA bought the rights to the likeness of James Franciscus from the estate of the dead actor.  From 1963 to 1965 the chiseled James Franciscus made a splash (many TV Guide covers) playing the title character “Mr. Novak” in a Peabody Award-winning TV series about an idealized role model of a sensitive English teacher who “who helped his high school students with their problems.”  The new NRA campaign, “Mr. Novak Gets Armed,” will again promote the Novak character as an ideal teacher, this time slinging a gun.

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Jennifer Baker said that the NRA was quite pleased to have acquired the James Franciscus rights.  “We are thinking effective time line here,” she said.  “Prior to his incarnation as the gentle Mr. Novak, Franciscus did a lot for our American culture wielding guns during the cowboy era of television on programs such as, `Gunsmoke,’ `Have Gun Will Travel,’ `Tales of Wells Fargo,’ `The Rifleman,’ `Death Valley Days,’ `Black Saddle,” `Rawhide,’ `The Deputy.’”  Said Ms. Baker, “those shows were marvelous, everybody carried a gun and justice always prevailed.”

Talk about starting out one’s career propitiously as a future NRA icon for younger minds, Franciscus was one of the featured actors in the wonderfully named 1957 film, “Four Boys and a Gun.”  And as for maximum firepower gloriously unleashed from all sides, think of WWII: Franciscus played the explosive Pfc. Charles Harris in an episode of the  “Combat!” TV series.  In a more contemporary modern dress format Franciscus was also involved in investigating detective gunplay in the “Naked City” and “The Investigators.”   He was in “The Investigators.” immediately preceding his assumption his Mr. Novak role.

“After having done so much to advance American culture and our vital understanding that you keep the bad guys, whoever they are, in check with fire power, the pencil pushing Mr. Novak, was an enormous disappointment,” explained Ms. Baker, “but owning the Franciscus image and having available all of the pictures of him with guns we now get to invert that time line.”  Obviously triumphant, she went on to say, “We get to invert the time line and take it forward to a new action-packed super attractive future where Mr. Novak will henceforth represent what an ideal teacher should be as he helps students survive tense shootouts in his school.”

Donald Trump has agreed to appear along side the gun-toting Mr. Novak of the future in an NRA web-produced reboot of the Novak character series.  How will this even be possible?  “Mr. Novak will be CGI,” said Ms. Baker and titillating tidbits leaked to Variety say that the NRA is reaching out to famed CGI character actor Andy Sirtis or, alternatively, Guy Henry to play Novak.  Henry memorably mimicked Peter Cushing in a CGI skin version of that actor playing Grand Moff Governor Tarkin in the recent last “Rogue One” Star Wars film.

“We’d actually prefer to have Andy in the role though,” said Ms. Baker, “because of the `Planet of the Apes’ tie-in.”   (Sirtis, in CGI skin, played Ceaser, the ape revolution-leading, sometimes gun-grabbing Ceaser in the “Planet of the Apes” reboot films.  Franciscus had a central role in the original `Planet of the Apes’ series as an  astronaut arriving to rescue the earlier arriving astronaut George Taylor played by Charlton Heston.  That was in the second film of the original series with its climactic scenes in front of a destroyed NYPL 42nd Street Central Reference library ending- spoiler alert- in the human civilization destroying nuclear war of the future revealed by the previous film being topped by an even bigger Trumpian-scale nuclear planetary destruction.

“The Franciscus image thus provides a felicitous echo,” asserts Ms. Baker, because people will recall that Charlton Heston was once, himself, another iconic spokesperson for the NRA, speaking as its president when with thespian skill he viscerally infused deathly intensity into the NRA/Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms slogan “I Will Give Up My Gun When They Peel My Cold Dead Fingers From Around It.”  (Are negotiations also underway with Heston’s estate? Time may tell, but there is many a slip between the cup and the lip- The tobacco industry had also attempted to buy rights to control Franciscus’ image.)

On the precipice of nuclear planetary destruction, NRA President Charlton Heston vies with Franciscus for domination.

According to what was leaked to Variety, being talked about is a 15 minute “Mr. Novak Gets Armed” web crossover episode with Trump’s “Apprentice” where a candidate (for a national security post?) disgruntled and drawing a gun when they are “fired” by President Trump while competing with Novak will be dispatched by a faster-on-the-draw Novak.

The Florida legislation requiring nearly all teachers to be armed will further require that teachers enter their class rooms with their guns drawn.   “Otherwise, students can get the drop on them,” said Ms. Baker.  The Franciscus/Novak campaign will deploy plenty of images of Novak thus entering the classroom to normalize this so students will be accustomed to such sights even before they experience them in real life.

Alex Wind, a student speaking at the junior at  March 24 Saturday student-led day \March for Our Lives

“The student protests have actually helped inspire us,” says Ms. Baker.  Here’s how.  At the March 24 Saturday student-led day of action March for Our Lives in which 800,000 took part in more than 800 protests, Alex Wind, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School made a speech in which he said:

Together, we will use our voices to make sure that our schools, churches, movie theaters and concerts, and our streets become safer, without having them feel like prisons. If teachers start packing heat, are they going to arm our pastors, ministers and rabbis? Are they going to arm the guy scanning tickets at the movie theater? Are they going to arm the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney? This is what the National Rifle Association wants, and we will not stand for it!

Ms. Baker’s answer is simple: “Yes, we also have legislation we are ginning up to require that pastors, ministers and rabbis and the costume characters at Disney all be armed along with the ticket takers at the entrances of all entertainment venues.”
  

As Longstreet in 1971

That’s legislation for the future.  Under the legislation currently being enacted, teachers who refuse to carry guns as required or refuse to enter classrooms with guns drawn will be subject to penalties.  Persistent and flagrant ongoing violations can, according to the new legislation, even include the death penalty.

The new NRA-drafted law also contains a fix for Florida’s death penalty.  The death penalty is legal in Florida (and at one point there was a fraternal competition between two of the Bush brothers as respective governors of Florida and Texas to see which state could legally execute the most people.)   “But there have been challenges to humanness of the death penalty and the methods of execution used,” Ms. Baker, “and our legislation fixes that, requiring that all future deaths be by firing squad using absolutely assuredly lethal AR-15 assault rifles.  If our students can tolerate being killed this way, there is no way to say that it is not a humane way to kill people we think committed crimes.”
 
Quite sensibly, not all teachers will be required to carry guns and some may even be prevented. Noting that in his last significant television series Franciscus played “Longstreet,” a disabled  insurance investigator who was blind and thus didn’t carry a gun (he sometimes defended himself with Bruce Lee Jeet Kun Do or his seeing eye dog named “Pax,” i.e. “Peace”), Baker explained that teachers who are blind will not be required to carry guns if they don’t want to, but they will be allowed to.

There is another category of teacher who might not be bearing arms.  “We are not extremists,” said Ms. Baker, going on to elaborate:

Gun control legislation has some legitimate origins, and to the extent there may be something at the core in terms of common sense that needs to be recognized we ought to be flexible.  We recognize southern traditions.  Ronald Reagan tenaciously continued to oppose gun control even after he himself was shot in a presidential assassination attempt, but he started out on the other side of the fence as a governor who fought to curtail gun ownership when it was feared that guns would be used by organizing black people like the Black Panthers.

Accordingly, teachers who are black, will not be automatically required to carry guns.  To the contrary, teachers who are black will have to apply to go through a vetting process if they wish to carry guns like the other Florida teachers.  Asked about what might happen if a gun armed blind teacher encounters a black teacher without a gun and what the blind teacher might assume about that other teacher following (or not) the new law and requirements, Ms. Baker said she was sure whatever the outcome it would be colorblind.

The NRA is hoping the effective date of the new legislation will be today, April 1st.