Pierce: It's Time for 'Law-Abiding Gun Owners' to Earn Their Keep
You know who I am thoroughly sick of hearing about?
Law-Abiding Gun Owners, that’s who.
I know they exist. I even know a few myself. But I am tired of having to buy them all a cookie every time somebody shoots up a school or a church or a country music concert in Las Vegas. I’m tired of taking them into consideration. I have no more room in my consideration for them, their feelings, or their durable outraged innocence. Most of them are very fine people, I’m sure, but they will have to look somewhere else for consideration. There are no more seats left on my Consideration Bus. There are too many coffins onboard these days.
After every one of these unfortunate exercises of Second Amendment rights in which many people end up dead, I hear about how the great majority of Law-Abiding Gun Owners are as outraged as the rest of us are, and about how we must not do anything about this country’s insane attachment to its firearms that might offends the “millions” of Law-Abiding Gun Owners there are out there.
Many of them, we are told, have no problem with an improved system of background checks. Many of them, we are told, can be convinced on bump stocks and even on some sensible controls regarding the stockpile of weapons of war in private hands. Many of them, we are told, are tired of being represented by the bloody-handed lobbyists and spokesdrones of the National Rifle Association.
My question, as always, is, what’s keeping you?
There never will be a better time for you to make a stand for the sensible gun laws you claim to support. The NRA is on the ropes. Hell, even corporate America is sick of Wayne LaPierre and his vision of America as a dystopian ruin, and corporate America has a very strong stomach for charlatans and crooks—and for dystopian ruins, now that I think about it.
Some very brave high school students in Florida have given you an opening to use your influence for something other than giving pollsters the right answers over the telephone. There will never be a better time to marshal the strength that people keep telling me you have on the issues that people keep telling me you support.
The NRA and the cowardly politicians who truckle to it are not your friends. They suck up your money and make you afraid and then they and the weapons manufacturers who are the NRA’s only real constituency laugh all the way to the slaughter-pen. Break their power. Support politicians who support the sensible gun laws you say you favor. Vote against the politicians who don't. You have the ability and the credibility to do it. Or don’t ask me to care about you, or to give you unearned consideration. There's no room on the Consideration Bus. Too many coffins to care about.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210302093
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No discussion, of course; we're not allowed to ask, for example, how an "assault weapon" is defined. Nope, it's a "weapon of war" and doesn't belong in civilian hands because 91% of gun homicides are with handguns and 4.8% with rifles and that just goes to show you how important it is to ban SOME rifles. And if you dare question it, my god does the NRA hate flow, along with the microdick jokes and snide comments about how terrified and fearful gun owners are.
Of course, this is a distraction, but it makes for good PR.
For some of them, the goal is to turn gun ownership into something that is socially unacceptable, like, say, smoking, or drunk driving, or being gay, or having an abortion, to change our country's culture. They figure that guns are a defining characteristic of the low-education, blue-collar, sub-rural and rural conservative voter and taking away one aspect of that identity is the first step towards recovery. And they will make it as hard as possible to own a gun simply because they see it as a positive societal goal.
Naturally, this backfires in several ways: one, it stimulates discussion about guns, which results in gun owners (or potential gun owners) looking at the highlighted guns in a new light, and buying them in large quantities. So when the goal is to have FEWER of a certain kind of gun sold, the opposite happens.
The green line is for rifles sold per capita. As our country becomes increasingly urbanized, do you really think those rifles are bolt-action hunting rifles?
Second, it puts Republicans in charge. There's a reason that those people have the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and 2/3 of state legislatures and governorships.
Third, it is burying the fundamental problem under hysteria. By treating this as a hardware issue, we're completely not talking about any other cause or problem! It's not even on the radar! All I seem to hear about is "gun culture is a sickness", "NRA blood money", "assault weapon bans", etc.
Those people seem to think that they can somehow reduce the lethality of guns so that when a psychopath storms into a brick-and-cement box full of trapped and helpless children, and has 5 minutes minimum before armed police show up to stop him... there have only been 3 or 4 kids killed. I guess? This part of it is something of a mystery to me because it's ridiculous.
And part of me thinks that is exactly why they've latched onto the concept of "assault weapon", because it always gives them a lever to advance their social agenda. It will never work, but like Reaganomics, the more it fails the more the faithful say "we just haven't gone far enough yet!"
Back in the day, there were a lot more schools around (they were a lot smaller) and they didn't have all the security they have now. Combined with guns you can get through mail order, no background checks, and no bans on "assault weapons"... this never happened.
Something changed in the 80's, and really changed in the 90's on to today. The Wikipedia list of school shootings in American history is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
But we can't talk about what changed; it's a hardware problem, people! Ignore all those shootings committed with handguns (like Virginia Tech), it's RIFLES we have to worry about!