Dana Loesch and the NRA’s Maternity Theater

“I want you to know that we will support your two children in the way that you will not.”

That was Emma González, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shootings, speaking to Dana Loesch, the spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, at on Wednesday evening. González made the comment as a lead-up to a question about the NRA’s position on semiautomatic weapons, and on the modifications that so effortlessly increase those weapons’ capacity to kill. Loesch, however, wasn’t at the town hall to talk about the guns that are used to murder; she was there to talk about the problems of the people (“people who are crazy,” she repeatedly emphasized) who use the guns to do the murdering. She was also there, she suggested, to soothe. She was there to protect. She was there to be motherly to a group of kids who are grieving.