The ALA: the NRA of Porn.

I love libraries. And I love guns. If the ALA and NRA combined into a new organization, I would be the first to join. The American Library and Rifle Association would be awesome:

Yes, sir, the loan period on Texas Rich by Fern Michaels is 14 days, but you can keep that Remington 7600 for 28 days.
No, we don't sell bullets here at the desk, but there's a cartridge vending machine in the lobby. You may fire the rifle in the gun range by the meeting room, but before you enter, please silence your cell phone.

I try to calculate how many books I'd need to get behind to stop a bullet if I saw some crazy person start shooting up the library. I'd like to think a couple of hardcover books could save my life, but I don't know. And that's exactly the reason why the ALA and NRA would make such a great team; books could be evaluated by their stopping-power.

You could say that there are no similarities between these two organizations, but I'd argue that they are very similar. The American Library Association defends the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of American, and the National Rifle Association fights to protect the Second.

The First Amendment guarantees a right to privacy, and the ALA would argue that this right extends into the public library, extends into the Internet, and protects an individual's right to view sexually oriented material ("monkey porn") in this semi-public arena.

The Second Amendment guarantees something about arms and militias that no one seems to understand, and protects my right to own a ceramic and polymer fully-automatic machine pistol, invisible to X-rays.

But if the First Amendment can protect porn videos which didn't exist when the Bill of Rights was drafted (regardless of what weird stuff Ben Franklin had hidden in his bedroom), then the Second Amendment must go all the way back to The Bible when Cain killed Abel, with the prevailing theory being that things would have different if God had used another of Adam's ribs to make Abel a Glock.

So the National Rifle Association defends idiots who own grenade launchers for the obvious reason that "bears is big." And the American Library Association has expanded on Justice Marshall's privacy opinion to include allowing a man to view video of a "donkey show" on any computer in a public library because it's educational.

In order to defend the broadest freedoms promised by The Constitution, each of these associations promotes the broadest stupidity.