Shortly after President Obama announced sweeping executive actions directed to private ownership of guns, the NRA's Vice President for Development of Possible Facts, Weldon LaTourette, accused the Obama administration of concealing from the public a CDC study that concludes guns can help lower the number of deaths from lung cancer.
"Five years ago someone left a flash drive on our front step containing a report entitled, 'Guns, Who Knew?,'" said LaTourette. He continued,
Each page of the document was stamped, "Secret--Do Not Leave on the Front Step of the NRA Under Any Circumstances."
Our interest was piqued.
The document was an unpublished CDC study of 250,000 at-risk male smokers between the ages of 30 and 75 who had been asked what it would take to get them to give up smoking. According to the report, 21 percent of the subjects said a gun would be an "OK" or "acceptable" or "awesome" substitute. When pressed to explain their responses, members of this sub-group said they preferred a gun because it has a greater circumference than a cigarette; is a more effective tool for getting attention; and is recyclable.
The report also contains interviews with men who had already given up smoking in favor of gun ownership, some of whom described uniquely personal reasons for the choice. Thus, for example, Irwin Leibman of New York said:
"Quitting was really easy for me. When I smoked, I'd wake up in the morning and reach for a butt on the bed stand. I still do that, but the butt isn't all crumpled up and it doesn't have my lipstick all over it."
Christopher, a Buffalo accountant, told the researchers:
"I'm pretty shy. I used to pull out a cigarette and offer one to a girl to get a conversation started. Once we lit up we maybe talked about how much we wanted to quit, but after that there was nowhere to go. With a gun, it's different."
And from Pope Last-Name-Withheld came the comment:
"We much prefer Our gun to Our cigarette. Although We were overcome by nostalgia each time the cigarette honored Us with the emanation of white smoke, when We learned that it did the same thing for everyone else, We decided to replace it with something that more accurately captured Our role as the only Being standing between man and God."
It's obvious why this report hasn't seen the light of day. When the CDC guys realized they'd created something that would take down Obama's gun control policy, they dug the deepest hole they could dig and buried it, after making a copy.
These are the facts. We didn't have to make them up and so we didn't. And while the mainstream media will try to undermine the report's credibility by focusing on the fact that 'The Onion' trademark appears faintly in the background of every other page, we must not let that distract us. As I said after our Chief Executive Officer called for armed guards to be stationed in every school in the nation, what may seem to be a joke may not actually be a joke.
In closing, I want to say that the NRA is proud to have been the spark that lit the fire that will now rage -- and I emphasize that I tend to speak metaphorically -- around the White House. What President Obama has done cannot stand. And while he may think he has the power to drag this country back to a time when a private citizen couldn't even bring an assault rifle to a presidential rally, no one -- not even the President of the United States -- can force the NRA to turn back the Glock.