dude you didn't watch the video did you...the old man was trying to march in protest.....something he has every right to do...the kid stood in front of him with a stupid grin on his face I would have gladly knocked off for him....and anyone else in a similar situation would have done.....but you being a red hat supporter want to blame an old native american
Mueller looking at NRA now
- Thread starter subhub174014
- Start date
dude you didn't watch the video did you...the old man was trying to march in protest.....something he has every right to do...the kid stood in front of him with a stupid grin on his face I would have gladly knocked off for him....and anyone else in a similar situation would have done.....but you being a red hat supporter want to blame an old native american
richard lester
Male
Sorry man you have TDS. I mean you don't even admit to the truth when it's clearly in front of you. I am middle of the road, not what you claim I am.
NRA Political Arm at Odds With NRA Members
Progress is difficult, because the issue is framed as a contest between the NRA and their Republican allies versus Democrats and gun control advocates. Doing so masks the real common ground that exists. It also places the issue in the middle of our zero-sum partisan politics, where progress is viewed through the lens of winners and losers.
Having traveled the state of Kansas in 2014 and again this past year, I’ve met with people on all sides of this issue. I believe there is significant common ground among gun owners and non-gun owners alike. Here are a few things I’ve learned.
For one thing, the political arm of the NRA doesn’t adequately represent the views of a majority of their members. The vast majority of NRA members and gun owners are responsible, patriotic people who obey the law and respect their neighbors and their communities. They also support reasonable gun safety measures. Many have handled firearms their whole life, taught gun safety classes, and spent time at the gun range and in the fields and forests hunting. They, better than most Americans, understand the need for reasonable gun safety measures. They haven’t bought into the argument that banning bump stocks or requiring training before someone gets a concealed-carry license is a slippery slope on the path to obliterating the Second Amendment. Rather, they understand the importance of gun safety to maintaining their Second Amendment rights.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...a_political_arm_at_odds_with_nra_members.html
Progress is difficult, because the issue is framed as a contest between the NRA and their Republican allies versus Democrats and gun control advocates. Doing so masks the real common ground that exists. It also places the issue in the middle of our zero-sum partisan politics, where progress is viewed through the lens of winners and losers.
Having traveled the state of Kansas in 2014 and again this past year, I’ve met with people on all sides of this issue. I believe there is significant common ground among gun owners and non-gun owners alike. Here are a few things I’ve learned.
For one thing, the political arm of the NRA doesn’t adequately represent the views of a majority of their members. The vast majority of NRA members and gun owners are responsible, patriotic people who obey the law and respect their neighbors and their communities. They also support reasonable gun safety measures. Many have handled firearms their whole life, taught gun safety classes, and spent time at the gun range and in the fields and forests hunting. They, better than most Americans, understand the need for reasonable gun safety measures. They haven’t bought into the argument that banning bump stocks or requiring training before someone gets a concealed-carry license is a slippery slope on the path to obliterating the Second Amendment. Rather, they understand the importance of gun safety to maintaining their Second Amendment rights.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a...a_political_arm_at_odds_with_nra_members.html
well will admit to some of that......but have had a far greater dislike for the NRA long before trump!
I used to be a member years ago
they published and article back in the late 80"s about the way to separate a man from his politics is through his sport.....in other words they pump your head full of all their ******* and you vote the way they tell you!
apparently you suffer from both deficiencies.....support trump and the NRA
Russian redhead NRA member who offered to broker a Trump-Putin meeting in 2016 is charged with election meddling - hours after Trump stood beside Putin and he 'didn't see any reason why' Kremlin would interfere in poll
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...U-S-political-organizations-Kremlin-boss.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...U-S-political-organizations-Kremlin-boss.html
richard lester
Male
Your really off. Your part of that whole far left regressive group that wants to start ******* and lie to push your false beliefs for your side. Your just mad to be mad. Seek help.
Timeline of Russian plot to infiltrate NRA and GOP
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-infiltrate-nra-and-gop/
you are just part of that brainwashed trump worshippers who don't see what is going on around you
richard lester
Male
Nope. I'm not. You are crazy for real! You can't even admit to a story being false that the news has even retracted. You can't be reasoned with. I'm done with what ever you are trying to sell.
An un-biased article covering both sides!
Gun Control Is a Misfire
The most fervent and polarized sides in the renewed debate on gun control share one piece of solid common ground: they both invest rather magical qualities in the cold, lifeless hardware of guns themselves.
For liberals, the very term “gun violence” has been reified into some sort of natural *******, completely detached from any identifiable root causes other than guns themselves—as if .45 semi-automatics, Bushmaster black rifles, and high-capacity magazines exert some hypnotic gravitational pull that beckons latent maniacs to pick them up and spray innocent crowds with military-like barrages.
On the other side, hardcore NRA supporters and certain other Second Amendment support groups define guns and weaponry as not just the symbolic but also the highest material expression of liberty, freedom, and moral rectitude. Anybody who can buy and possess a gun, especially if he or she conceals it—or even open carries—in public, automatically passes into the ranks of being a “good guy.” No matter what this new hero’s background, inclinations, or emotional make-up might be.
Now it seems this sterile debate is destined to become a wedge issue once more. So it was in the early ’90s, thanks to an aggressive push by the NRA. This time around, however, Democrats are flogging the issue and taking the initiative.
It’s a rather radical departure for liberals. Many a Democratic operative was convinced that the Gingrich Congress, with high-caliber NRA funding, swept in as a snapback to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban championed by California’s Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and backed by the Clinton White House. And when Al Gore could not carry his own state of Tennessee in 2000—which would have put him over the top regardless of Florida’s Hurricane Chad—those same party insiders were further convinced that gun control was the culprit.
With Democrats and liberals persuaded that the issue had become politically radioactive, they dropped gun control like a red-hot rifle barrel. Indeed, during the 2008 presidential primary cycle, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement slapping Republican candidate Mitt Romney for having supported gun control while governor of Massachusetts. “Either Mitt Romney’s brand new NRA lifetime membership card wasn’t activated in time to get him into the convention or Romney was afraid he wouldn’t be able to smooth talk his way out of his record on gun issues,” wrote DNC spokesman Damien LaVera.
During his first term in office, the only action that Barack Obama took on the issue was to liberalize the possession of guns in national parks and wildlife refuges. Yet liberals have now done another about-face. At the beginning of this year, on the heels of a high-profile shooting on an Oregon college campus that took nine lives, a teary-eyed president went on national TV to announce some small-scale tweaks in ATF regulations saying, “as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough.”
Denunciations of a rampant “gun violence epidemic” and “mass shootings” have become leading liberal campaign tropes. For Hillary Clinton, her opponent Bernie Sanders’s D-minus rating from the NRA is not good enough.
Mega-billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has poured millions into gun-control organizations, many of them brandishing filed-down, soft-sounding names like “Everytown Against Gun Violence” and “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.” The words “gun control” have been replaced with what seem to be focus-group-tested euphemisms like “sensible gun reform,” “common sense gun safety reform,” and now the ubiquitous “opposition to gun violence.”
The web fills up daily with liberal memes about a “Florida man” or some other poor soul shooting himself accidentally or getting shot by his toddler, creating the impression that in this nation of 320 million people such incidents are now as prevalent as the common cold—or at least more common than people showing up in the ER to have sex-related gadgets removed from this or that orifice.
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings late last year, MSNBC’s talking head Rachel Maddow, along with other liberal outlets like Vox, stoked the fires of the renewed and rebranded gun-control movement by quoting a spurious Washington Post claim that in 2015 America was bloodied by a staggering 355 mass shootings.
No matter that Mark Follman, keeper of a database on shootings in America for the decidedly left-of-center and adamantly anti-NRA mom Jones, debunked this hysteria in the New York Times, saying there had been, in fact, only four mass killings in 2015—consistent, more or less, with the tallies of the previous 30 years. “[A]s those numbers gain traction in the news media,” Follmer wrote, referring to the preposterous figure of nearly one mass shooting per day, “they distort our understanding.”
Follman’s quest to remain clear-headed on the matter—instead of joining in the growing demagogy that suggests going to the movies in America today resembles something like being in the infantry defending Fallujah—leaves him in a fairly rarified minority, at least on the liberal left.
The renewed push for more gun control—or against “gun violence” if you prefer—should be fully understandable. The *******-soaked media spectacles of the Gabby Giffords shooting, the massacres in Aurora and Charleston, and the thought of 20 small children and six adults gunned down in Newtown very well should produce an emotional shock and urge “to do something.” For Democrats, however, these incidents urged them to cynically reload the gun-control issue and offer a number of mostly useless proposals that will do nothing to reduce gun murders.
Most of the underpinnings of “gun violence” reforms are based on skewed assumptions, mixed with a sometimes shocking dose of ignorance on the part of policymakers, re-enforced by a media class that cannot often tell one end of a gun from the other. The rhetoric of the movement also continues to stigmatize just about anybody who owns a gun as a knuckle-dragging supporter of fringe militias. Worse, at least from my perspective, the current gun-control strategy also plays directly into the hands of an NRA that is, in fact, more a lobbying group for the gun industry than for gun owners.
Liberals also now recur to the scourge of “gun violence” as a convenient way to betray their own historic commitment to greater social justice. No longer do they need to tackle such daunting issues as urban decay, low wages, and poor education because they prefer to reverse cause and effect: if we could only get rid of guns… It’s become a catchall mantra for the disorder of too many urban centers and the marginalization of their inhabitants, who are the ones doing most of the dying—and most of the killing.
Some personal disclosure is in order. My rap against the majority of gun-control activists does not stem from an absolutist Second Amendment position. I think there are some rational and bold legislative steps that should be enacted to reduce all social violence, including that from a barrel of a gun. Like most rational people, yes, I oppose innocent people dying from gunshots. Politically, I might be defined as a libertarian leftist—definitely a leftist. I am also a gun owner and a member in good standing of the (small) Liberal Gun Club. I own 10 guns, including a legal AK-47, incorrectly vilified as an “assault rifle.” And I reload my own ammo.
I would love to see an honest debate on guns in American life. But I refuse to support what has essentially become one more distracting, off-point skirmish in the culture wars. There is very little seriousness and a whole lot of cultural red meat in the reborn Democratic push against “gun violence.” It is fashioned much more to buck up partisan electoral support in swing suburban districts and among minority voters than to reduce the abuse of guns. To “oppose gun violence” or to argue for “common sense gun safety,” even without knowing anything about the issue, merely imbues rank-and-file liberals with a warm, fuzzy sense of moral superiority.
Likewise, a fiction has been born that all gun owners are an identifiable and unique species dominated by chubby white men enthralled by Rush Limbaugh, militias, and a desire to shoot it out with jackbooted Feds. Gun owners in reality defy pigeonholing as “gun nuts” or “gunners,” and whenever I go target shooting at my local Los Angeles range I find a crowd who by age, race, and apparent social background are wildly more diverse than the University of Southern California journalism school faculty from which I recently retired.
On a very personal basis, I will confess, I am now tired of and deeply annoyed by affluent liberals—living in 6,000-square-foot houses with heated swimming pools, who use a 400-horsepower SUV to drive their ******* two blocks to school, with a family carbon footprint that of a small battleship—asking me sharply, “So why do you need so many guns?” or “Why on earth do you need such a powerful rifle?”
Getting to a rational position on guns and gun control, however, now requires conjoining a number of hard facts and shooting down a bevy of shibboleths kept alive and energized by liberal ignorance. It requires anything but an emotion-driven lashing out at strawmen.
Thanks to pernicious legislation sponsored by the NRA, firearms research in the United States is full of roadblocks. So nobody really knows how many guns there are in America. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report estimated that in 2009 there were 310 million firearms: “114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.” Other more recent estimates put the figure between 245 million or 360 million.
The precise figure means little. One way or another there is “easy access” to guns. And as firearms tend to survive and function for many, many decades, there can be absolutely no discussion of gun control without accepting this simple, cold reality.
I am not interested in any discussion of what the Second Amendment really means, nor am I much interested in any moral discourse either way on guns. I am not, simply, because the horse left the barn a very long time ago and those guns are here to stay. No buyback program, no further restriction laws, no weapons bans are going to make any visible difference. Any control measure that does not start from this reality is about as realistic as signing a petition against earthquakes.
The only concrete achievement of the gun-control movement has been to generate an ever-increasing amount of gun sales. And many advocates are not honest in declaring their underlying motivation.
Gun-control activists need not take my word for it that their strategy has been a rank failure. In 2015, the FBI processed a record number of firearms background checks: more than 23 million requests were handled by the National Instant Background Check System. Again, there is no certainty, but it is estimated that only 1 percent or maybe 2 percent of those checks come back negative, meaning that at least 20 million new guns were put into circulation just last year.
This trend has been building historically. If the goal of gun-control advocates has been to reduce what’s called easy access to guns, they have totally failed—if not been running the wrong way down the field.
Yes, the NRA’s constant drumbeating about “gun grabbers” and real or imagined fears about terrorist attacks help fuel the binge buying. Yet while the NRA clearly exaggerates the threat of gun confiscation, control advocates lay the groundwork by focusing their efforts far too much on the gear—the guns—instead of the people who use them.
Further, count me among those who suspect the real motives of many of those who try to soft-sell control with the new euphemisms of “gun safety reform” and “sensible gun reform.” There is no way to substantiate my guess scientifically, but having spent my adult life in a primarily “progressive” and “liberal” milieu it is rather obvious to me that many, if not most, urban middle-class liberals who do not own guns actually hate guns. That is their understandable right. But just underneath their mumbo-jumbo rhetoric about “gun safety” lurks a desire to somehow magically do away with, ban, or confiscate guns and repeal the Second Amendment.
Look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign slam on Bernie Sanders for having voted for the 2005 law that granted gun manufacturers heavy layers of protection against legal liability claims. Said Clinton recently: “So far as I know, the gun industry and gun sellers are the only business in America that is totally free of liability for their behavior. Nobody else is given that immunity. And that just illustrates the extremism that has taken over this debate.”
As NPR Fact Check pointed out, that’s not 100 percent true. Clinton’s statement “doesn’t appear to be completely accurate,” Adam Winkler, professor of law at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, told NPR. “The 2005 law does not prevent gun makers from being held liable for defects in their design. Like car makers, gun makers can be sued for selling a defective product. The problem is that gun violence victims often want to hold gun makers liable for the criminal misuse of a properly functioning product.”
If Clinton’s stated desire to overturn that law were fulfilled, it would obviously mean that gun makers could be sued for engaging in truth-in-advertising, i.e., for selling ostensibly lethal weapons that actually are lethal. In what sort of logic is that not advocating the shutdown of the industry? (Sanders, by the way, under pressure from Clinton’s attacks and much of his own progressive base, reversed his position before the Iowa caucuses and is now supporting a bill that would weaken that immunity.)
Gun homicides are on a historic decline and are not a growing epidemic.
The round-the-clock coverage given to the handful of outright gun massacres by tabloid outlets like CNN creates the sensation that firearms homicides are a rapidly multiplying American epidemic. The reality is quite different, if not the opposite.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, gun deaths have been in general decline for more than 20 years, down some 31 percent since 1993. Between 1993 and 2000 the tally was down a full 50 percent, even as gun sales increased. Since 2000 the gun ******* rate has more or less stabilized, showing only marginal variation up or down year to year.
About 11,000 Americans every year are shot to death when someone else pulls the trigger. Twice that number commit suicide by gun. Let’s repeat that fact: two-thirds of American gun violence is deliberately self-inflicted, and while certainly lamentable represents no public safety threat—unless you are among those committing suicide.
Gun suicides since 2010, in fact, have ticked slightly upward. Would any gun control measure slow down the suicide rate? I have no idea, nor does anybody else. I would have to assume not, just as prohibiting alcohol did nothing to diminish alcoholism. (But it sure did fuel armed gang warfare by bootleggers.)
The Pew study also found, to nobody’s surprise, that in spite of the falloff in gun deaths, a full 56 percent of Americans thought that gun-related killings had actually increased over the last 20 years.
As to “gun safety”—the new catchword for gun control—the grand total of accidental gun deaths in the U.S. hovers at about 500 per year. Even strict gun-control advocates put the number no higher than 600.
It’s never comfortable playing the atrocity game of comparing death tolls, but it’s necessary when fashioning public-policy priorities: notably, the CDC calculates that 75,000 Americans die each year of HA-I, or Healthcare Associated Infections, a fancy term for the deaths of otherwise nonterminal patient caused by lethal bacteria in hospitals. Perhaps a campaign advocating “Health Care Safety Reform” is in order?
Mass killings are not the biggest gun problem we face. And gun death is not an equal-opportunity offender.
The single greatest inconvenient truth in the totality of the gun issue is that mass killings of the sort carried out in Roseburg, Oregon or Newtown, Connecticut are absolute outliers. These sorts of atrocities account for far less than 1 percent of American gun deaths. And a majority of these killings employed legally purchased weapons.
These are also acts carried out by clearly mentally ill subjects. Is it cruel, insensitive, or cynical to say that probably nothing could prevent such massacres? No. Even in highly authoritarian states like China, where civilian ownership of guns is strictly forbidden and the citizenry is tightly monitored, crazed individuals, given enough will, can spread bloody mayhem, in some incidents using knives to ******* five or 10 times the number of victims in the worst American mass shootings.
And to obsess over high-profile campus killings, while pretty much ignoring the daily meat-grinder ******* toll in urban hot spots like Chicago or Detroit, takes our eyes off the bigger problem. Writes African-American columnist Jamelle Bouie:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/gun-control-is-a-misfire/
I myself own over 30 guns and am not supporting any type of gun control......well except on the assault rifle......I am against the NRA and it's greedy fear mongering...just to push sales
Gun Control Is a Misfire
The most fervent and polarized sides in the renewed debate on gun control share one piece of solid common ground: they both invest rather magical qualities in the cold, lifeless hardware of guns themselves.
For liberals, the very term “gun violence” has been reified into some sort of natural *******, completely detached from any identifiable root causes other than guns themselves—as if .45 semi-automatics, Bushmaster black rifles, and high-capacity magazines exert some hypnotic gravitational pull that beckons latent maniacs to pick them up and spray innocent crowds with military-like barrages.
On the other side, hardcore NRA supporters and certain other Second Amendment support groups define guns and weaponry as not just the symbolic but also the highest material expression of liberty, freedom, and moral rectitude. Anybody who can buy and possess a gun, especially if he or she conceals it—or even open carries—in public, automatically passes into the ranks of being a “good guy.” No matter what this new hero’s background, inclinations, or emotional make-up might be.
Now it seems this sterile debate is destined to become a wedge issue once more. So it was in the early ’90s, thanks to an aggressive push by the NRA. This time around, however, Democrats are flogging the issue and taking the initiative.
It’s a rather radical departure for liberals. Many a Democratic operative was convinced that the Gingrich Congress, with high-caliber NRA funding, swept in as a snapback to the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban championed by California’s Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and backed by the Clinton White House. And when Al Gore could not carry his own state of Tennessee in 2000—which would have put him over the top regardless of Florida’s Hurricane Chad—those same party insiders were further convinced that gun control was the culprit.
With Democrats and liberals persuaded that the issue had become politically radioactive, they dropped gun control like a red-hot rifle barrel. Indeed, during the 2008 presidential primary cycle, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement slapping Republican candidate Mitt Romney for having supported gun control while governor of Massachusetts. “Either Mitt Romney’s brand new NRA lifetime membership card wasn’t activated in time to get him into the convention or Romney was afraid he wouldn’t be able to smooth talk his way out of his record on gun issues,” wrote DNC spokesman Damien LaVera.
During his first term in office, the only action that Barack Obama took on the issue was to liberalize the possession of guns in national parks and wildlife refuges. Yet liberals have now done another about-face. At the beginning of this year, on the heels of a high-profile shooting on an Oregon college campus that took nine lives, a teary-eyed president went on national TV to announce some small-scale tweaks in ATF regulations saying, “as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough.”
Denunciations of a rampant “gun violence epidemic” and “mass shootings” have become leading liberal campaign tropes. For Hillary Clinton, her opponent Bernie Sanders’s D-minus rating from the NRA is not good enough.
Mega-billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has poured millions into gun-control organizations, many of them brandishing filed-down, soft-sounding names like “Everytown Against Gun Violence” and “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.” The words “gun control” have been replaced with what seem to be focus-group-tested euphemisms like “sensible gun reform,” “common sense gun safety reform,” and now the ubiquitous “opposition to gun violence.”
The web fills up daily with liberal memes about a “Florida man” or some other poor soul shooting himself accidentally or getting shot by his toddler, creating the impression that in this nation of 320 million people such incidents are now as prevalent as the common cold—or at least more common than people showing up in the ER to have sex-related gadgets removed from this or that orifice.
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings late last year, MSNBC’s talking head Rachel Maddow, along with other liberal outlets like Vox, stoked the fires of the renewed and rebranded gun-control movement by quoting a spurious Washington Post claim that in 2015 America was bloodied by a staggering 355 mass shootings.
No matter that Mark Follman, keeper of a database on shootings in America for the decidedly left-of-center and adamantly anti-NRA mom Jones, debunked this hysteria in the New York Times, saying there had been, in fact, only four mass killings in 2015—consistent, more or less, with the tallies of the previous 30 years. “[A]s those numbers gain traction in the news media,” Follmer wrote, referring to the preposterous figure of nearly one mass shooting per day, “they distort our understanding.”
Follman’s quest to remain clear-headed on the matter—instead of joining in the growing demagogy that suggests going to the movies in America today resembles something like being in the infantry defending Fallujah—leaves him in a fairly rarified minority, at least on the liberal left.
The renewed push for more gun control—or against “gun violence” if you prefer—should be fully understandable. The *******-soaked media spectacles of the Gabby Giffords shooting, the massacres in Aurora and Charleston, and the thought of 20 small children and six adults gunned down in Newtown very well should produce an emotional shock and urge “to do something.” For Democrats, however, these incidents urged them to cynically reload the gun-control issue and offer a number of mostly useless proposals that will do nothing to reduce gun murders.
Most of the underpinnings of “gun violence” reforms are based on skewed assumptions, mixed with a sometimes shocking dose of ignorance on the part of policymakers, re-enforced by a media class that cannot often tell one end of a gun from the other. The rhetoric of the movement also continues to stigmatize just about anybody who owns a gun as a knuckle-dragging supporter of fringe militias. Worse, at least from my perspective, the current gun-control strategy also plays directly into the hands of an NRA that is, in fact, more a lobbying group for the gun industry than for gun owners.
Liberals also now recur to the scourge of “gun violence” as a convenient way to betray their own historic commitment to greater social justice. No longer do they need to tackle such daunting issues as urban decay, low wages, and poor education because they prefer to reverse cause and effect: if we could only get rid of guns… It’s become a catchall mantra for the disorder of too many urban centers and the marginalization of their inhabitants, who are the ones doing most of the dying—and most of the killing.
Some personal disclosure is in order. My rap against the majority of gun-control activists does not stem from an absolutist Second Amendment position. I think there are some rational and bold legislative steps that should be enacted to reduce all social violence, including that from a barrel of a gun. Like most rational people, yes, I oppose innocent people dying from gunshots. Politically, I might be defined as a libertarian leftist—definitely a leftist. I am also a gun owner and a member in good standing of the (small) Liberal Gun Club. I own 10 guns, including a legal AK-47, incorrectly vilified as an “assault rifle.” And I reload my own ammo.
I would love to see an honest debate on guns in American life. But I refuse to support what has essentially become one more distracting, off-point skirmish in the culture wars. There is very little seriousness and a whole lot of cultural red meat in the reborn Democratic push against “gun violence.” It is fashioned much more to buck up partisan electoral support in swing suburban districts and among minority voters than to reduce the abuse of guns. To “oppose gun violence” or to argue for “common sense gun safety,” even without knowing anything about the issue, merely imbues rank-and-file liberals with a warm, fuzzy sense of moral superiority.
Likewise, a fiction has been born that all gun owners are an identifiable and unique species dominated by chubby white men enthralled by Rush Limbaugh, militias, and a desire to shoot it out with jackbooted Feds. Gun owners in reality defy pigeonholing as “gun nuts” or “gunners,” and whenever I go target shooting at my local Los Angeles range I find a crowd who by age, race, and apparent social background are wildly more diverse than the University of Southern California journalism school faculty from which I recently retired.
On a very personal basis, I will confess, I am now tired of and deeply annoyed by affluent liberals—living in 6,000-square-foot houses with heated swimming pools, who use a 400-horsepower SUV to drive their ******* two blocks to school, with a family carbon footprint that of a small battleship—asking me sharply, “So why do you need so many guns?” or “Why on earth do you need such a powerful rifle?”
Getting to a rational position on guns and gun control, however, now requires conjoining a number of hard facts and shooting down a bevy of shibboleths kept alive and energized by liberal ignorance. It requires anything but an emotion-driven lashing out at strawmen.
Thanks to pernicious legislation sponsored by the NRA, firearms research in the United States is full of roadblocks. So nobody really knows how many guns there are in America. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report estimated that in 2009 there were 310 million firearms: “114 million handguns, 110 million rifles, and 86 million shotguns.” Other more recent estimates put the figure between 245 million or 360 million.
The precise figure means little. One way or another there is “easy access” to guns. And as firearms tend to survive and function for many, many decades, there can be absolutely no discussion of gun control without accepting this simple, cold reality.
I am not interested in any discussion of what the Second Amendment really means, nor am I much interested in any moral discourse either way on guns. I am not, simply, because the horse left the barn a very long time ago and those guns are here to stay. No buyback program, no further restriction laws, no weapons bans are going to make any visible difference. Any control measure that does not start from this reality is about as realistic as signing a petition against earthquakes.
The only concrete achievement of the gun-control movement has been to generate an ever-increasing amount of gun sales. And many advocates are not honest in declaring their underlying motivation.
Gun-control activists need not take my word for it that their strategy has been a rank failure. In 2015, the FBI processed a record number of firearms background checks: more than 23 million requests were handled by the National Instant Background Check System. Again, there is no certainty, but it is estimated that only 1 percent or maybe 2 percent of those checks come back negative, meaning that at least 20 million new guns were put into circulation just last year.
This trend has been building historically. If the goal of gun-control advocates has been to reduce what’s called easy access to guns, they have totally failed—if not been running the wrong way down the field.
Yes, the NRA’s constant drumbeating about “gun grabbers” and real or imagined fears about terrorist attacks help fuel the binge buying. Yet while the NRA clearly exaggerates the threat of gun confiscation, control advocates lay the groundwork by focusing their efforts far too much on the gear—the guns—instead of the people who use them.
Further, count me among those who suspect the real motives of many of those who try to soft-sell control with the new euphemisms of “gun safety reform” and “sensible gun reform.” There is no way to substantiate my guess scientifically, but having spent my adult life in a primarily “progressive” and “liberal” milieu it is rather obvious to me that many, if not most, urban middle-class liberals who do not own guns actually hate guns. That is their understandable right. But just underneath their mumbo-jumbo rhetoric about “gun safety” lurks a desire to somehow magically do away with, ban, or confiscate guns and repeal the Second Amendment.
Look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign slam on Bernie Sanders for having voted for the 2005 law that granted gun manufacturers heavy layers of protection against legal liability claims. Said Clinton recently: “So far as I know, the gun industry and gun sellers are the only business in America that is totally free of liability for their behavior. Nobody else is given that immunity. And that just illustrates the extremism that has taken over this debate.”
As NPR Fact Check pointed out, that’s not 100 percent true. Clinton’s statement “doesn’t appear to be completely accurate,” Adam Winkler, professor of law at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, told NPR. “The 2005 law does not prevent gun makers from being held liable for defects in their design. Like car makers, gun makers can be sued for selling a defective product. The problem is that gun violence victims often want to hold gun makers liable for the criminal misuse of a properly functioning product.”
If Clinton’s stated desire to overturn that law were fulfilled, it would obviously mean that gun makers could be sued for engaging in truth-in-advertising, i.e., for selling ostensibly lethal weapons that actually are lethal. In what sort of logic is that not advocating the shutdown of the industry? (Sanders, by the way, under pressure from Clinton’s attacks and much of his own progressive base, reversed his position before the Iowa caucuses and is now supporting a bill that would weaken that immunity.)
Gun homicides are on a historic decline and are not a growing epidemic.
The round-the-clock coverage given to the handful of outright gun massacres by tabloid outlets like CNN creates the sensation that firearms homicides are a rapidly multiplying American epidemic. The reality is quite different, if not the opposite.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, gun deaths have been in general decline for more than 20 years, down some 31 percent since 1993. Between 1993 and 2000 the tally was down a full 50 percent, even as gun sales increased. Since 2000 the gun ******* rate has more or less stabilized, showing only marginal variation up or down year to year.
About 11,000 Americans every year are shot to death when someone else pulls the trigger. Twice that number commit suicide by gun. Let’s repeat that fact: two-thirds of American gun violence is deliberately self-inflicted, and while certainly lamentable represents no public safety threat—unless you are among those committing suicide.
Gun suicides since 2010, in fact, have ticked slightly upward. Would any gun control measure slow down the suicide rate? I have no idea, nor does anybody else. I would have to assume not, just as prohibiting alcohol did nothing to diminish alcoholism. (But it sure did fuel armed gang warfare by bootleggers.)
The Pew study also found, to nobody’s surprise, that in spite of the falloff in gun deaths, a full 56 percent of Americans thought that gun-related killings had actually increased over the last 20 years.
As to “gun safety”—the new catchword for gun control—the grand total of accidental gun deaths in the U.S. hovers at about 500 per year. Even strict gun-control advocates put the number no higher than 600.
It’s never comfortable playing the atrocity game of comparing death tolls, but it’s necessary when fashioning public-policy priorities: notably, the CDC calculates that 75,000 Americans die each year of HA-I, or Healthcare Associated Infections, a fancy term for the deaths of otherwise nonterminal patient caused by lethal bacteria in hospitals. Perhaps a campaign advocating “Health Care Safety Reform” is in order?
Mass killings are not the biggest gun problem we face. And gun death is not an equal-opportunity offender.
The single greatest inconvenient truth in the totality of the gun issue is that mass killings of the sort carried out in Roseburg, Oregon or Newtown, Connecticut are absolute outliers. These sorts of atrocities account for far less than 1 percent of American gun deaths. And a majority of these killings employed legally purchased weapons.
These are also acts carried out by clearly mentally ill subjects. Is it cruel, insensitive, or cynical to say that probably nothing could prevent such massacres? No. Even in highly authoritarian states like China, where civilian ownership of guns is strictly forbidden and the citizenry is tightly monitored, crazed individuals, given enough will, can spread bloody mayhem, in some incidents using knives to ******* five or 10 times the number of victims in the worst American mass shootings.
And to obsess over high-profile campus killings, while pretty much ignoring the daily meat-grinder ******* toll in urban hot spots like Chicago or Detroit, takes our eyes off the bigger problem. Writes African-American columnist Jamelle Bouie:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/gun-control-is-a-misfire/
I myself own over 30 guns and am not supporting any type of gun control......well except on the assault rifle......I am against the NRA and it's greedy fear mongering...just to push sales
a typical right wing trumpie...believe what you have been told and close your brain to anything that doesn't go along with how you have been brainwashed.....part of a pathetic group of mindless drones
Maria Butina Admits Conspiring as Kremlin Agent Targeting ...
https://news.yahoo.com/butina-admits-conspiring-kremlin-agent...
Dec 14, 2018 · The 30-year-old gun enthusiast operated as a Kremlin agent as she befriended National Rifle Association leaders and influential U.S. conservatives, she …
and why would the kremlin want to get into the NRA?
full of mindless people who believe anything they are told......just what the kremlin wants!
https://news.yahoo.com/butina-admits-conspiring-kremlin-agent...
Dec 14, 2018 · The 30-year-old gun enthusiast operated as a Kremlin agent as she befriended National Rifle Association leaders and influential U.S. conservatives, she …
and why would the kremlin want to get into the NRA?
full of mindless people who believe anything they are told......just what the kremlin wants!
Man you need some help....communist countrys sre bad...simple easy FACT...if you want that here move...i can even follow your logic its like trying to follow the logic of a 2 y/o. Im a proud nra memeber and if i want an AR i can and will have an AR. The Russians tried to inflitrate and influence, ok so what, they didnt change any votes and trump didnt work with them to do so. We know for a fact Hillary people did go to the Ukrainian embassy for help and we know Hillary and her camp bought a false dossier. And we know the liber babies on the left needed legos and playdough when she lost. Get over it dude, you refuse to listen to reason and logic and refuse to have a civil conversation. Thats the problem the left calls names like racist and facist when people dont agree with them and whine and cry. They dont care when their own do things they decry on the right, and push for failed policys and types of governement. They forget they, the dems, were the party of slavery and against civil rights and equal rights and just want to tax the ******* out of people. They want it all now now now and have no vision for the future. Sorry but i forget who said this and i may screw it up but the probellem with socialism and like is eventually you run out of other peoples money to spend. Then you end up with lines to buy the last rolls of tp and bread lines. If you want that please move to a country thats failing with those policys. The founders were pretty damn smart.
If you cant have a civil conversation and realize you cant have it all now now now and if you dont agree with me your a racist bullshit then do me a favor shut up and let adults talk
If you cant have a civil conversation and realize you cant have it all now now now and if you dont agree with me your a racist bullshit then do me a favor shut up and let adults talk
Gun sales have dropped since Trump’s election, except ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gun-sales-have-dropped...
Nationwide, overall gun sales are trending downward after record highs during the Obama administration. According to the FBI, background checks, which are conducted at the request of licensed firearm dealers and retailers when they make sales, dropped from 3.3 million in December 2015 to 2.8 million in December 2016.
Gun Sales Have Dropped Since Trump's Election | Fortune
fortune.com/2017/08/04/trump-gun-sales-obama
Gun Sales Have Dropped Since Trump's Election. Sturm Ruger and Vista Outdoor both rose over 1% on Friday but were down for the past week by 7% and 2%, respectively. American Outdoor Brands was down 1.1% on Friday and 3% lower in the past five sessions.
Gun, Ammo Stock Drops Now That Trump is President-Elect
https://bearingarms.com/beth-b/2016/11/09/gun-ammo-stock-drops-now...
Gun, Ammo Stock Drops Now That Trump is President-Elect. O nce last night’s race was called for Donald Trump, stock in the gun manufacturing industry began to tank. Smith and Wesson saw a 16 percent plummet while Sturm, Ruger & Co. saw a 12 percent drop – …
Gun stocks have plunged since Trump was elected
https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/11/news/companies/trump-gun-stocks
Nov 11, 2016 · Gun stocks have plunged since the election of Donald Trump. Trump was endorsed by the National Rifle Association and was the clear favorite of white, rural, gun-loving America. But the stock prices for Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Smith & Wesson (SWHC) have both dropped by more than 20% since Trump …
Gun sales dropped for three straight months since Donald ...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/19/gun-sales-dropped...
Mar 19, 2017 · But the industry is also feeling the political change that came when Mr. Trump, who campaigned aggressively for gun rights, was elected to succeed President Obama, who …
and why did all this happen?
fearmongering......the NRA un-able to tell you now that a Dem is going to take your gun
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gun-sales-have-dropped...
Nationwide, overall gun sales are trending downward after record highs during the Obama administration. According to the FBI, background checks, which are conducted at the request of licensed firearm dealers and retailers when they make sales, dropped from 3.3 million in December 2015 to 2.8 million in December 2016.
Gun Sales Have Dropped Since Trump's Election | Fortune
fortune.com/2017/08/04/trump-gun-sales-obama
Gun Sales Have Dropped Since Trump's Election. Sturm Ruger and Vista Outdoor both rose over 1% on Friday but were down for the past week by 7% and 2%, respectively. American Outdoor Brands was down 1.1% on Friday and 3% lower in the past five sessions.
Gun, Ammo Stock Drops Now That Trump is President-Elect
https://bearingarms.com/beth-b/2016/11/09/gun-ammo-stock-drops-now...
Gun, Ammo Stock Drops Now That Trump is President-Elect. O nce last night’s race was called for Donald Trump, stock in the gun manufacturing industry began to tank. Smith and Wesson saw a 16 percent plummet while Sturm, Ruger & Co. saw a 12 percent drop – …
Gun stocks have plunged since Trump was elected
https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/11/news/companies/trump-gun-stocks
Nov 11, 2016 · Gun stocks have plunged since the election of Donald Trump. Trump was endorsed by the National Rifle Association and was the clear favorite of white, rural, gun-loving America. But the stock prices for Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Smith & Wesson (SWHC) have both dropped by more than 20% since Trump …
Gun sales dropped for three straight months since Donald ...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/19/gun-sales-dropped...
Mar 19, 2017 · But the industry is also feeling the political change that came when Mr. Trump, who campaigned aggressively for gun rights, was elected to succeed President Obama, who …
and why did all this happen?
fearmongering......the NRA un-able to tell you now that a Dem is going to take your gun
I am an Army combat VET!....I just hate the NRA as they are nothing more than a way to push their sales and brainwash a bunch of fucking idiots into believing what they want......why else would Russia want to be involved?....they know where the biggest group of fools and idiots are!
and just who is refusing to listen?
that would be you...…..things that go against your years of mind fucking just don't fit in
and the Russians didn't put 30 million into trumps campaign for nothing...brain washing and mind fucking....that's what they did!
the basic idea of the NRA is fine...and I was a part of it...but when it turned into a political tool and a funnel for the gun manufa to push sales......nothing I want anything to do with
