Wayne LaPierre, the well-compensated boss of the National Rifle Association, routinely warns of approaching tyranny against which “real” Americans must arm themselves. He’s wrong.

The tyranny’s already here. It’s the tyranny of the NRA itself.

Let’s do some math:

The NRA claims 5 million members.

The United States has a population of 325 million.

Thus, 1 in every 65 Americans belongs to the NRA.

That means that 1.5 percent of the population has been able to impose its position on firearms on the other 98.5 percent of the population.

Sounds like tyranny to me.

What enables this dictatorship of the caliber-iat? A spineless Congress that puts re-election ahead of children’s lives, safe schools and the right to safety of law-abiding citizens.

The irony is that, if only members of Congress banded together against the NRA, they’d quickly find that the emperor-for-life has not only no hunting clothes but an empty magazine, too.

Still, let us take Mr. LaPierre’s professions of his commitment to freedom seriously. In his passion for democracy, I’m sure he’d support holding a national referendum on banning semi-automatic, assault-style rifles (the sort preferred by mass murderers). Let the people decide whether or not such weapons belong in civilian hands. Give the other 98.5 percent of the population a chance to be heard.

Of course, that’s the last thing LaPierre and his fellow senior NRA executives (none of whom served in uniform) would want to see. Poll after poll shows that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of reasonable controls on firearms sales.

If such a nationwide vote were held, the NRA would take a beating from which it would never recover.

So the NRA will continue to market its primary ware: not guns, but fear. The NRA’s millionaire bullies convince hard-working men and women to contribute membership dues of $40 per year, preaching that the alternative would be for malign forces within our government — that strangely elusive “deep state” — to seize power and take our guns.

The NRA’s dire warnings fuel a bizarre, all-too-common fantasy among its acolytes (I’ve been startled by how often I’ve encountered it). The scenario runs that either our government and military will turn on the population in a new civil war, or the government and military will suffer catastrophic failure — at which point our freedom will be preserved by out-of-shape, middle-aged men with AR-15s.

My fellow Americans, if our military can’t protect us, geezers with guns won’t.

Then there’s the current headline topic of guns in schools, with more guards and armed teachers.

Is that the country we want to be? A land in which our children cannot learn math or reading without the presence of heavily armed guards? Do we desire to be the first country in the world in which K-through-12 schools become fortresses?

The NRA’s logic is circular: We need more guns to protect us from the guns we’ve already bought at its behest. It’s a policy diet that leads to ballistic obesity.

Also in the name of liberty, NRA supporters circulate carefully selected quotes from several Founding Fathers — Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry — in support of the notion of a well-armed population.

None of those cited served in the Continental Army that freed us from Britain. Each of them let others do the fighting for them.

Jefferson famously remarked that “the tree of freedom must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.” He just didn’t want it to be his blood.

And each of those men was a slave owner. I’d take their rhetorical bravado with a very large grain of saltpeter.

Will we, the people, ever be permitted to vote to express our views on weapons of mass murder? Of course not. Mr. LaPierre doesn’t like democracy that much. And Congress does as the NRA dictates.

Tyranny, tyranny, tyranny.

We could lay the bodies of our massacred children on the lawn of the NRA headquarters in Virginia, and the NRA would just pull down the blinds.



Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer, a former enlisted man and a gun owner.