This is a "prop."
Welp,
you're a monster:
Scott Bach, an NRA board member and head of the NRA's New Jersey affiliate, dismissed the family of a child who died during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre as "a prop" in response to the family's support for a New Jersey bill that would limit gun magazine size.
Lemme explain something here. Being a paid advocate for the opinions of a hugely influential organization makes you a
prop. You are there, by definition, as a
prop. You get paid cash money to be a
prop, and your opinions, the ones the organization coordinates with you and assists you in presenting, are a
prop intended to alter the national scenery in a way more pleasing to that organization. Your opinions are a painted cardboard tree designed to make lawmakers believe there is a forest of like-minded opinions even though there might not be. Nobody from your family had to die in order for you to formulate your opinion. Your opinion is one that nets you good cash money and some nice media appearances, as opposed to one forged as you held the cold hand of your dead child before he or she was taken to be put in the ground, and if we gathered the entire collective opinions of every NRA board member in the country we could lay them flat, one on top of the other like the scrapped cardboard sets of a school production of
Hamlet and they would still reach no taller than one elementary school child.
That is what a prop is; a part of a fake scene intended to portray a fake reality in order to distract the viewer from the plain reality of what they are looking at. Do not look at the real world for a while, the prop says, we have a far more pleasing scene over here, one of our own design, one that we have made because we like this one better. That is a prop. Claiming that not even those that have suffered the worst of personal tragedies have legitimacy in your little cardboard forest, not compared to all the lovely trees you have painted, that is being a prop. Like a straw-stuffed scarecrow tied to the top end of a pole, your value lasts only until the surrounding wildlife starts to figure you out.