National Rifle Association News contributor Billy “I’m a thinker” Johnson has a new idea for education in America: Give everyone a gun, starting with kids.
“Gun policy driven by our need for guns would insist that we introduce young people to guns early and that we’d give them the skills to use firearms safely,” the resident hipster gun enthusiast says in a YouTube video posted to the NRA’s channel Sunday.
Sporting a beard, black plastic frames, and a Louis C.K.-like black T-shirt, he calls for adding guns to school curriculum.
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“Just like we teach them reading and writing, necessary skills. We would teach shooting and firearm competency. It wouldn’t matter if a child’s parents weren’t good at it. We’d find them a mentor. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t want to learn. We would make it necessary to advance to the next grade.”
Johnson draws an equivalency between the right to own guns and the right to education, public parks, and non-discrimination policies in hiring.
“The point is,” he says, “that as a country we often write policy to protect access to something; education, parks, jobs. But for one of the most important protections, a constitutional right, we write policy designed to limit access.”
His solution? Stop regulating access to guns, as if “they’re bad or dangerous.” Instead, he muses, why not regulate as if all people need guns, everywhere? “What if instead of gun free-zones we had gun-required zones?” he asks.
Johnson’s video mirrors some 80 other heavily produced video op-eds, from seven “NRA Commentators,” meant to attract specific demographics (mostly millennials) into the gun-rights fight.
Not mentioned in the video: Firearms kill or injure 10,000 American children each year.
