You might think Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of and spokesman for the mighty American gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, has an almost cosmic sense of timing. In 2007, at the NRA's annual convention in St. Louis, he warned the crowd that, "Today, there is not one firearm owner whose freedom is secure."
Two days later, a young man opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing 32 students, staff and teachers. Just last week LaPierre showed up at the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty here in New York and spoke out against what he called "anti-freedom policies that disregard American citizens' right to self-defense."
Now at least 12 are dead in Aurora, Colo., gunned down by a mad man at a showing of the new Batman movie filled with make-believe violence. One of the guns the shooter used was an AK-47 type, assault weapon that was banned in 1994. The National Rifle Association saw to it that the ban expired in 2004. The NRA is the best friend a killer's instinct ever had.
Obviously, LaPierre's timing isn't cosmic, just coincidental; as Shakespeare famously wrote, "The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." In other words, people. People with guns. There are an estimated 300 million guns in the United States; one in four adult Americans owns at least one and most of them are men. The British newspaper The Guardian reminds us that over the last 30 years, "The number of states with a law that automatically approves licenses to carry concealed weapons provided an applicant clears a criminal background check has risen from eight to 38."
Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year. Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns.
So why do we always act so surprised? Violence is alter ego, wired into our Stone Age brains, so intrinsic its toxic eruptions no longer shock, except momentarily when we hear of a mass shooting like this latest in Colorado. But this, too, will pass and the nation of the short attention span quickly finds the next thing to divert us from the hard realities of America in 2012.
We are after all a country that began with the forced subjugation into slavery of millions of Africans and the reliance on arms against Native Americans for its Westward expansion. In truth, more settlers traveling the Oregon Trail died from accidental, self-inflicted gunshots wounds than Indian attacks -- we were not only bloodthirsty but also inept.
Nonetheless, we have become so gun-loving, so blasé about home-grown violence that in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined. In Arizona last year, just days after the Gabby Giffords shooting, sales of the weapon used in the slaughter -- a 9 millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol -- doubled.
We are fooling ourselves. That the law could allow even an inflamed lunatic to easily acquire murderous weapons and not expect murderous consequences. Fooling ourselves that the Second Amendment's guarantee of a "well-regulated militia" be construed as a God-given right to purchase and own just about any weapon of destruction you like. That's a license for murder and mayhem and it's a great fraud that has entered our history.
There's a video of which I'd like to remind you. You can see it on YouTube. In it, Adam Gadahn, an American-born member of al-Qaeda, the first U.S. citizen charged with treason since 1952, urges terrorists to carry out attacks on the United States. Right before your eyes he says:
"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"
The killer in Colorado waited only for an opportunity, and there you have it -- the arsenal of democracy transformed into the arsenal of death and the NRA, the NRA is the enabler of death -- paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel hoax, a cruel and deadly hoax. I'm Bill Moyers.
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The NRA members disagree with the NRA's policy but they have no voice presumably because the money and hence power comes from the arms manufacturers. Could taxation help in the same way that tobacco addiction has been reduced?
I don't want to live (or raise my family for that matter) in an OK Corral type atmosphere. I can remember reading about Tombstone, Arizona in the Wild West days - any idiot with a gun could come into town, have a few whiskey's at the saloon and come out shooting. Women, children, innocent bystanders - anyone was fair game. That is until the sheriff made a law that anyone coming into town had to check their firearms in at the sheriff's office. They could collect them again on their way out of town. And that, to me, was the beginning of civilization in Arizona. When people could walk into town to carry out their business in safety and not have to worry about some person with a Napoleonic complex carrying a six shooter to make him feel like a man.
If you want my opinion, it would be much more effective to invest in a years supply of Viagra.
guns instead of taking away privacy. I am surprised that the
terrorist, if they exist, which I doubt, have not used this easy
access to weapons of mass destruction in the US.
I find it interesting that right before the underwear bomber, there was a printer loaded with plastic explosives that was put on a passenger plane as commercial cargo. The printer wasn't tracked down until, I think, the plane was over Chicago. You would think, if the powers that be were so concerned about the public's safety that they would disallow business cargo to be transported on the same planes as passengers. Would make sense, right? But no. That would cut into the domestic airplane's profit - and we can't sacrifice safety for profit now, can we?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/fear_pays_chertoff_n_787711.html
http://shiftfrequency.com/tag/lenco-bearcat/
And there have been many controls applied to cars aimed at decreasing accidental deaths. Seat belts, air bags, front end construction rules, anti-roll over stability rules.
The weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians brought us wars we never should have started, the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the exporting of American jobs, citizens united and are marching us towards plutocracy.