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The NRA is an anti-American organization. Not its members, but the organization and what it purports to believe. This came into sharp focus for me on Friday when three local schools were locked down.

A friend shared her text messages with her 15 year old son. How she remained calm when texting him was one of the mysteries of motherhood that even dads don’t always understand. But I wept in my living room when I thought about this lovely family I know from church and how they wrestled with the unimaginable fear that someone with a gun was in the school.

This was no drill or joke. Those kids were counting the number of tables between them and the door. And my friend was trying to reach the police by phone, and it wasn’t getting answered.

So, deep breath here for me, folks.

I’m going to give you some data, and then I’m going to ask you to take an action after I do that.

In Florida, the gun legislation that passed this week still didn’t go far enough to meet public sentiment. It was approved by 67 legislators who have an A or A+ rating from the NRA. The people who pushed this bill through are Republicans.

Governor Rick Scott is a Republican with an A+ rating from the NRA. He wasted no time in signing the bill. That’s what the people’s representatives wanted in Florida.

The NRA filed a lawsuit against Florida within HOURS. They are fighting one of the law’s provisions. Wanna know which one?

They are fighting against the provision that raises the legal age to buy a gun from 18 to 21.

The NRA was taken over in the 1970s by lobbyist hacks. It’s a fascinating story that we don’t have time for right now, but this is not your grandfather’s NRA.

This is a group that uses fear against its members and makes large political contributions to get their way. The Parkland students finally broke through the noise and showed everyone that the emperor has no clothes and that the NRA’s old stranglehold on politicians needs to end.

Remember those babies at Sandy Hook who were murdered more than five years ago? A 20 year old white man (school shooters are pretty much all young white men) killed his mother. That’s pretty serious.

Then he went to the school and fired 154 bullets that tore apart 20 children between the ages of five and six. There were also 6 adults killed. Then the murderer shot himself.

The NRA’s response blamed rap music, video games, and movies for the massacre. Of course they know that these are all readily available in every country that don’t suffer multiple mass gun massacres every year.

They needed a scapegoat because they announced a plan to put an armed guard in every school that would be trained by the NRA. And just like that, the NRA would continue their egregious abuse of the American political system by entrenching itself in state school systems.

Listen, the people who are NRA members are just like any of us for the most part. Maybe they hunt. Maybe they are sports shooters. Whatever they’re doing is something that’s gone on for years. No reasonable person is suggesting that guns are rounded up from every American and the majority of dues-paying NRA members don’t buy into this crazy vigilante stuff.

But almost everyone–including NRA members–supports smart gun laws and closing loopholes. Obama didn’t come from your guns. Donald Trump did. And Florida Governor Rick Scott saw the loss of life in his state and agreed with the Florida legislature that people under the age of 21 shouldn’t be able to buy guns.

Did you know that 68 of the 84 school shootings in K-12 schools over 3 years were done by people under the age of 21?

That’s compelling data.

There are many such areas that need to be addressed in our society. And the second amendment of the Constitution isn’t inviolate. It can be changed. That’s what the word amendment means!

Here is what I want you to do if you’re tired of mass shootings.

If you are not registered to vote, I want you to register right now. You can do it online in two minutes here: https://www.vote.org/register-to-vote

If you are already registered to vote, please join one or several of the leading gun violence prevention groups. Put your name on their lists and get their emails. They will help you stay informed about ways you can help take the country back from gun manufacturer lobbyists.

Everytown for Gun Safety

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America 

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

I’m glad my friends and their families are safe. I am tired of this fight, and you must be too. The hostage situation in California yesterday is already out of the news.

We cannot allow ourselves to sit back again and wait for the next shooting so that we can take to Facebook, to emails, to bars and gyms, and mutter about thoughts and prayers.

We need to be acting now. Learning what a gun violence prevention group does won’t mean that you have to turn in your guns. It means that you’re able to handle the dissonance caused by holding two conflicting beliefs in your mind at the same time.

And yes, you can do it. But go register right now and join those groups after that.

I will chastise any news organization that distorts the truth. But CNN took withering criticism from the president and dozens of conservative media outlets alleging that they scripted a Parkland High student, who did not appear on their town hall. No outlet was more relentless in attacking CNN than Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson.

Carlson said tonight that “there is no evidence” that CNN tried to script a Parkland High student’s question.

What Carlson needed to say…

What the president needs to say…

And what all those other media outlets need to say…

is that Colton Haab’s father has admitted that he distributed a doctored email thread between his son and a CNN producer.

What I don’t hear are apologies coming from the president or from Fox News. And that’s unfortunate because if you study fraud-based journalism, you’ll learn that people like W.R. Hearst helped goad the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.

You may have heard the phrase “yellow journalism” which was the term used then for “fake news”. Hearst sent a famous illustrator to Cuba, who reported that there were no hostilities there. “You send the picture, I’ll send the war,” was his reply.

Fast-forward a few decades and Hearst is publishing interviews with Hitler, Mussolini and Goring in the mid-1930s.

In other words, we’ve been here before. And when lies are allowed to be published without challenge and retractions use mealy-mouthed phrases, the danger of repeating past mistakes rises.

CNN sensationalizes a lot of content. But they didn’t take advantage of a Parkland survivor. The young man’s father did that. And Fox News beat the drums for a week. Their actions potentially harmed life-saving societal change that the Parkland kids are helping us see are necessary to decrease the amount of gun violence in our country.

And Fox News doesn’t seem to give a damn about that. If you’re a viewer, perhaps you should consider this a representative story of so much of the agenda that they push. If you’ve read this far, you clearly believe in truth. If you insist on watching Fox News, perhaps you can also balance it with information from other, non-partisan sources.

As for the president, his behavior continues to lead him down a path of becoming one of the most reviled people to ever hold the office. If you support him, you don’t care. If you oppose him, you simply add this lie about CNN that he repeated to a worldwide stage to the list of nearly 2,000 lies he has told while in office.

This should startle you:

Of the more than 360 access-related gun bills proposed by Congress since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, only one has become law, according to an Axios analysis (by Haley Britzky, Chris Canipe and Andrew Witherspoon) of congressional bill data from ProPublica.

The only bill to become law, the Federal Law Enforcement Self-Defense and Protection Act of 2015, declares that a federal law enforcement official is allowed to carry federally-issued firearms during a furlough.

— Axios

It’s time to end the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress.

Call your rep at 202.224.3121.  Tell the nice person who answers that you want common-sense gun legislation that protect us and our families.

North Korea made a diplomatic overture to South Korea this week at the Olympic Games. No one ever knows whether such a gesture is legitimate. All we know before conversations occur is that diplomacy and negotiation is better than heightened tensions leading to body bags.

“We will not allow North Korean propaganda to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games,” U.S. Vice President and Jesus follower Mike Pence said while a guest in South Korea. “We will not allow North Korea to hide behind the Olympic banner the reality that they enslave their people and threaten the wider region.”

The words printed in my Bible don’t heap scorn on a peaceful gesture. They implore us to turn the other cheek. They tell us to seek and pursue peace. And they tell us that our greatest commands include that we love one another.

None of this is taught in Christian religions with the caveat that love, peace, and striving for good relations among the nations of the world does not apply to North Korea. Or to Afghanistan. Or to Russia.

Many Christians I know appreciated that Osama bin Laden was found and will not commit acts of terror anymore. They were also conflicted about the celebrations over his death. I was one of them. And two nights later, in a prayerful and respectful way, we asked each other, “How are we supposed to feel good and happy about another person’s death?”

Saber rattling wasn’t Jesus’ style. When he returned to face the authorities, he did so riding on a donkey, with people waving palm fronds instead of weapons.

Vice President Pence often speaks about his faith. I wish he would act more in accordance with its teachings.

You’re right to be outraged, but don’t be outraged about the words. Save your anger for the hate and the divisive nature of what the president says, not the profanity he uses.

And here’s the kicker: right now, I want you to think of two people you know–friends, family, coworkers–who share the president’s philosophy, but don’t express it in such crude terms.

You might make excuses for those people, but that doesn’t change the fact that millions of Americans share the president’s feelings about immigration. That’s especially true of immigration of non-white people.

Two of the three women the president has married were immigrants, but their skin was pretty white so that must be okay. And the president’s mother was also an immigrant, but she was pretty white too. Friends, it’s clear to me that immigration doesn’t bother the president or those people you thought of. It’s non-white people moving here.

Look, you can believe that isolationism is good foreign policy. We probably won’t agree, but we can have that discussion. But it’s not your country, fellow white people.

White European settlers overran the people living here and stole the land. So unless you’re ready to tell me from which indigenous people all of your ancestors originated from, we can agree that your ancestors took the land and you really have no position to be screaming that others can’t move here. That’s still going on today so we are all complicit.

People in other countries don’t laugh at us or hate us for our freedom. They mock us because we don’t acknowledge our racism or the way that we treat most other people as inferior. That’s done in other countries too. We just don’t acknowledge it. In fact, we deny it.

But watch the videos from Charlottesville again. Those were our neighbors and families marching with swastikas and torches. The vision horrified any American who lived through World War II and the rest of the world where there are everyday reminders of that horror.

Are you really grateful that Martin Luther King shared his dream of children of all races playing together or do you just want another Monday off?