If the National Rifle Association (NRA) were not so dangerous to the physical health and general welfare of the people of the United States, they'd probably qualify as some of the most unintentionally hilarious people on the planet. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Take executive vice-president of the NRA, (the suspiciously French sounding) Wayne LaPierre. If you started from scratch and constructed an (at least theoretical in his case) human being, you couldn't find a better movie villain. A man who foams at the mouth when fetishising about guns on national TV, attacks sitting Presidents in terms usually reserved for dictators and inaugural-lip syncers and has the look of a howling mad member of Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice's gang from Dick Tracy - replete with the beady eyes, vestigial rage and bad posture.

That Lapierre's little gaggle of government-fearing, 1970s-Death-Wish-obsessing miscreants actually claim they're trying to increase people's safety can almost make your sides hurt from the hysterics, as it carries with it the legitimacy of Manti T'eo giving lectures on Nigerian bank swindles.

These are the guys who released an iPhone app for kids as young as four to shoot at coffin-shaped targets on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown Massacre. That little high-capacity-magazine of brilliance has probably jetted them right past Applebee's on the sliding scale of public-relations brilliance, up next to Alex Rodriguez.

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On Wednesday, Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women's Forum gave some bizarre testimony about how young moms just love AR-15s because they're scary and serve a great purpose when five or six gunmen burst in the house with malevolent intentions.

As it turns out, Trotter has made other statements since the Newtown massacre as well, mostly in support of the NRA's contention that more guards in schools will somehow magically solve the problem.

Her editorial for Fox News chides people for having any objection to armed guards in schools. "Gun-rights opponents have begun scoffing at the notion of armed guards in our children's schools," she writes, and then goes on to say that "doesn't prevent the gun-rights opponent-in-chief from relying on a government-provided security detail to protect his own children."

Yes, well. This is all very easy for Trotter to say, because she doesn't send her six children to public school. No, her children go to to Beauvoir School in Washington DC, where tuition is $31,250 per year, per child. (I hope there's a group discount.) One of the "perks" of attending Beauvoir School? Armed guards patrolling the grounds, evidently.

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