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Raffling Off Assault Rifles
by THE EDITORIAL
BOARD
Oct. 4, 2013
The Republican Party of Rhode
Island is attracting well-deserved scorn for its plan to raise money Sunday by raffling an AR-15-style
assault rifle — the same sort of modified military weapon used last December in
the Newtown school massacre in neighboring Connecticut.
The rifle is the main prize
at the state Republican Party’s “2nd Amendment celebration” at a rod and gun
club in West Greenwich — “a family day at the range full of targets, food,
prizes and fun,” but truly devoid of even rudimentary sensitivity to the
carnage inflicted on Americans from weapons devised not for sport but for the
battlefield.
The state party is in lock
step with the National Rifle Association, which will run its own online “banned
guns” raffle later this month,
offering a dozen assault rifles that the association triumphantly notes
Congress failed to ban after the Newtown
schoolhouse massacre.
Some state Republicans with
an eye on future elections are having nothing to do with their raffle, which
Dawson Hodgson, the deputy Republican minority leader in the State Senate,
described as “tone deaf and insensitive, at best.” But the state party
chairman, Mark Smiley, is standing by the raffle and its $5 chance to empower
some citizen with a gleaming Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle. “I suppose
putting it in the press will bump up ticket sales and help raise more money for
the R.I.G.O.P.,” said Brian Newberry, the House Republican minority leader, of
the negative publicity surrounding the event.
Party leaders are trying to
take cover by righteously noting the raffle winner must submit to a background
check. Background checks, of course, remain one of the more porous parts of gun
safety law. Grotesque gun raffles are more proof of the gap between the anguish
of the citizenry at repeated shooting sprees and the complacency of the
politicians who do so little to address them.
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