Wednesday afternoon, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre published a bizarre, paranoid screed on the Daily Caller outlining a series of wildly implausible scenarios in which (among other things) the police will cease to exist because of the deficit and al-Qaeda will provoke the government into stealing your guns. Here are the nine most absurd quotes from LaPierre’s piece:

1. Violent Latino Gangs Are Out To Get You: “Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States. Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.”

2. And They’re Streaming Over The Border: “The president flagrantly defies the 2006 federal law ordering the construction of a secure border fence along the entire Mexican border. So the border today remains porous not only to people seeking jobs in the U.S., but to criminals whose jobs are murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping.”

3. And So Is Al-Qaeda: “Ominously, the border also remains open to agents of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Numerous intelligence sources have confirmed that foreign terrorists have identified the southern U.S. border as their path of entry into the country.”

4. And Obama Will Use Them As An Excuse To Take Your Guns: “A heinous act of mass murder—either by terrorists or by some psychotic who should have been locked up long ago—will be the pretext to unleash a tsunami of gun control.”

5. If You Want Gun Safety, You Want Civilization To Collapse: “After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.”

6. Thanks To Obama, There Will Soon Be No Cops: “Meanwhile, President Obama is leading this country to financial ruin, borrowing over a trillion dollars a year for phony “stimulus” spending and other payoffs for his political cronies. Nobody knows if or when the fiscal collapse will come, but if the country is broke, there likely won’t be enough money to pay for police protection. And the American people know it.”

7. But The NRA Is Totally Not Paranoid: “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that.”

8. It’s Just That The Collapse Of Civilization Is Right Around The Corner: “We, the American people, clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.”

9. And We Shall Overcome: “We [the NRA] are the largest civil rights organization in the world.”

LaPierre’s rant after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was of a similar tenor.

A bill to ban guns on college campuses cleared Colorado’s House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and heads to the Education Committee Wednesday morning. The bill would add college campuses to the short list of exceptions to concealed carry permits. Permits currently let gun owners carry their weapons everywhere in the state besides K-12 schools and federal properties.

House Bill 1226 was crafted in response to a 2011 state Supreme Court ruling that forced the University of Colorado to allow guns on campus. Permit holders could still carry their guns on campus, but not in campus buildings, school sporting arenas, or at school-sponsored events.

After the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, the University of Colorado compromised by creating separate off-campus housing for students who wanted to carry their guns on campus. However, zero students opted to live in the college’s gun dorm. While the University of Colorado has had no complaints since their gun ban was overturned, there have been 20 shootings on college campuses in the US since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.

The state legislature is also considering a bill that would require gun owners to pay $10 for their own background check, which one Republican lawmaker argued is “a poll tax.” Another measure approved by the Judiciary Committee would ban high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than 15 rounds, like the kind used by James Holmes in the Aurora theater shooting.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)

This past weekend, Wisconsin NRA lobbyist Bob Welch declared at the group’s annual meeting that they would soon continue weakening the nation’s gun laws, but would have to wait for the “Connecticut effect” to blow over first.

Murphy chastised the NRA for Welch’s remark during an MSNBC interview on Wednesday:

MURPHY: I think we will get a vote and I think we’ll get a vote because Newtown changed everything in this country. There were a lot of people wearing ribbons on the floor of the House of Representatives last night, and they were Republicans and Democrats. The NRA said yesterday they were going to wait for the “Newtown effect” or the “Connecticut effect” to dissipate before they went back to lobbying to weaken gun laws. Well, it’s not going to dissipate. The fact is that this nation has been transformed. I think the president was right to say, listen, republicans can’t hide from this. They need to call a vote on the floor of the Senate and House and tell the American public what side they are on. If Republicans want to be the party of assault weapons, of high-capacity magazine clips, they are on the wrong side of the American public and the wrong side of history.

Watch it:

Two other Nutmeg State lawmakers similarly condemned the NRA for their “Connecticut effect” comments yesterday, Blumenthal and Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT), who represents Newtown in Congress.

Ari Berman reports on the secretive, big money donors backing the legal effort to convince the Roberts Court to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act this June. As he explains, most of the wealthy individuals backing this effort have managed to maintain their secrecy by passing their money though a conservative group named Donor’s Trust:

Many of the states and donors who have supported discriminatory voting laws are also backing [anti-Voting Rights Act attorney Ed] Blum. His Project on Fair Representation is exclusively funded by Donors Trust, a consortium of conservative funders that might be the most influential organization you’ve never heard of. Donors Trust doled out $22 million to a Who’s Who of influential conservative groups in 2010, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafted mock voter ID laws and a raft of controversial state-based legislation; the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Koch brothers’ main public policy arm; as well as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform Foundation. Donors Trust has received seven-figure donations from virtually every top conservative donor, including $5.2 million since 2005 from Charles Koch’s Knowledge and Progress Fund. (The structure of Donors Trust allows wealthy conservative donors like Koch to disguise much of their giving.)

From 2006 to 2011, Blum received $1.2 million from Donors Trust, which allowed him to retain the services of Wiley Rein, the firm that unsuccessfully defended Ohio’s and Florida’s attempts to restrict early voting in federal court last year. As a “special program fund” of the tax-exempt Donors Trust, Blum’s group does not have to disclose which funders of Donors Trust are giving him money, but he has identified two of them: the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. The Wisconsin-based Bradley Foundation paid for billboards in minority communities in Milwaukee during the 2010 election with the ominous message “Voter Fraud Is a Felony!”, which voting rights groups denounced as voter suppression. Both Bradley and Searle have given six-figure donations to ALEC in recent years, and Bradley funded a think tank in Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute, that hyped discredited claims of voter fraud to justify the state’s voter ID law, currently blocked in state court.

New research suggests that universal background check legislation of the sort currently being debated in Congress has had an enormous impact on gun violence in the past, according to testimony presented at Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary committee. Daniel Webster, the Director Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, studied the consequences of Missouri repealing its “permit-to-purchase” law in 2007. This law, which required a background check as well as a brief sheriff’s review be conducted on all gun sales, closed the private sales loophole, and its repeal meant that Missouri would allow guns to be sold privately without a background check for the first time in recent history.

Webster found evidence that the expiration of the law resulted in a sharp, roughly 25 percent spike in the homicide rate in Missouri — despite the fact that gun violence was declining nationally and regionally:

Preliminary evidence suggests that the increase in the diversion of guns to criminals linked to the law’s repeal may have translated into increases in homicides committed with firearms. From 1999 through 2007, Missouri’s age-adjusted homicide rate was relatively stable, fluctuating around a mean of 4.66 per 100,000 population per year. In 2008, the first full year after the permit-to-purchase licensing law was repealed, the age-adjusted firearm homicide rate in Missouri increased sharply to 6.23 per 100,000 population, a 34 percent increase. For the post-repeal period of 2008-2010, the mean annual age-adjusted firearm homicide rate was 5.82, 25 percent above the pre-repeal mean. This increase was out of synch with changes during that period in age-adjusted homicide rates nationally which decreased ten percent and with changes in other states in the Midwest which declined by 5%.