What the NRA should have said

Here's some free PR advice for the NRA: Stop talking about guns.

You took a week after the Newton mass shootings to tell us to ignore what our eyes see and our hearts feel. We see too much death, and all these killings have the same common denominator -- guns. Many of us feel that if we can just make fewer instruments of death available to the bad guys, they could inflict less pain.

When the NRA tells us the answer is more guns, it insults our sensibilities. Seeing the good guys and bad guys shooting it out when their own children are inside the school cannot be the answer. That's not a safer alternative. We know that in our hearts.

The NRA promised a meaningful contribution and then retreated to old talking points. Here's what a meaningful conversation from the NRA could have said:

The Newton children were in danger the moment the killer decided to act. Their lives were at risk the moment he started planning how he would enter the school and assail the teachers and students. They were in danger when he decided that killing innocent human beings was the answer to the problems he was facing.

Once he made that decision, he had a wide range of possibilities on the tools he would use to implement his plan. He chose a tool that millions of Americans own and use responsibly. He chose to use them for his destructive purposes.

What if we could get to him before he decided on that deadly path? We would like to invest into more research that helps us identify and predict why someone would choose such flagrant murder. We would like to intervene and help provide them with more appropriate alternatives.

This will be the NRA's meaningful contribution. We will begin work with the mental health, family services, education communities and any organizations that can help us accelerate the work to find answers. These mass murderers start as our brothers and sons before they choose to become killers. Let's give them other alternatives, so that a deadly path no longer seems like an attractive option.

This approach never mentions the word gun, never threatens the NRA mission, and doesn't offend our senses. In today's post Newton reality, the less the NRA talks about guns, the higher their chances of keeping some of them.