I haven’t watched the video yet but most folks opining on the intersphere about NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s drunken interpretive burlesque performance this morning are in various forms piteous, shocked, amused, bemused and all-around befuddled.  Here’s the video:

And some reactions.  The best of which is (naturally) from Wonkette:

In a bizarre “press conference” that permitted no questions, National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre declined to offer the sort of small but sensible concession that many idiots like your Editrix expected in the wake of the Newtown massacre — offering to compromise on the gun show loophole for background checks, for instance, or maybe something about okay fine maybe we don’t need hollow-point bullets — and instead declared #war on gun-free zones at elementary schools, celebrities, the Legend of Zelda, the lack of a national registry of the mentally ill, and probably single mothers and Easy Bake ovens, we don’t know because at some point his words smashed through our brains and splattered them all over our monitor. It is very messy.

The nation’s jaw literally fell off its face as it collectively realized that Code Pink and Medea Benjamin are a bunch of goddamn heroes and that the NRA had fallen into its own Glenn Beckian black hole of insanity as LaPierre spouted weird words about how if soldiers and Secret Service agents have guns then so must the guy standing the local pizza joint’s ground, and that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” (Or, and we’re just spitballing, a bad guy not having a gun.) Even trained police officers accidentally shoot unarmed people (especially if they’re black, Hispanic, or mentally ill) but obviously nothing could go wrong when random folks are armed like Robocop.

Entertainment Weekly’s mind was similarly blown:

In one of the most bizarre press conferences held on live television, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre launched a hostile, self-pitying attack on the media, the entertainment industry, and schools themselves for the killings in Newtown, Conn. His solution: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Interrupted twice by protestors carrying signs with sentiments such as “NRA: Blood On Its Hands,” LaPierre called for “armed security” in “every single school in America.” LaPierre said “the national media machine rewards” mass killers with coverage. He condemned “vicious, violent videogames” such as Mortal Kombat and showed a clip from a videogame called “Kindergarten Killers.” He bad-mouthed “movies such as American Psycho and Natural Born Killers.” He scolded “violent music videos” and scorned anyone who “has the nerve to call it entertainment.” Overall, the entertainment industry promotes “the filthiest form of pornography,” said LaPierre.

It was a stunning news conference. A man whose organization does its best to defeat gun legislation decried “all the noise and anger directed at us.” He had the unspeakable gall to suggest that the Sandy Hook Elementary School and its Newtown school system could have done something to prevent the killings, namely: “What if Adam Lanza … had been confronted by qualified armed security.” “Will you at least admit it is possible that 26 little kids — that 26 innocent lives  — might have been spared that day?” he asked. Right: It was the fault of bureaucrats in Connecticut and Washington that caused the bloodshed. Blaming the victims? That’s more obscene than a movie, a videogame, or a music video.

Sully puts it in perspective:

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner’s already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre’s deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government. There is no conservative party in the West – except for minor anti-immigrant neo-fascist ones in Europe – anywhere close to this level of far right extremism. And now the damage these fanatics can do is not just to their own country – was the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 not enough for them? – but to the entire world.