The Single Most Important Fact about our Gun Culture

[SecularMotion]

…is 30,000 corpses each and every year. There are a lot of other secondary considerations. But that is, overwhelmingly, from a prolife perspective, the single most important fact.

My views on our gun culture are fairly simple. It can be boiled down to this: the human tradition of the second amendment does not trump the divine revelation of the fifth commandment. That’s because, to repeat, the single most important fact of our gun culture is 30,000 corpses each year.

In case that is still fuzzy, allow me to repeat it one more time: The single most important fact about American gun culture is 30,000 dead people each year. Are there other important questions about property, safety, and liberty? Sure. But the single most important fact is 30,000 corpses.

If it were Al-Quaida killing 30,000 Americans each year, it would be treated as a civilizational emergency requiring a national effort to prevent as many of those deaths as possible. But because it is Americans killing themselves and each other, the reply that I consistently get to that fact is a huge amount of fantasizing about the Great Hitler Gun Confiscation that Is To Come, and a kind of terrified paralysis that turns a blind and hostile eye to even the most common sense attempts to effect even the teeniest change to the status quo.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/05/the-single-most-important-fact-about-our-gun-culture.html

[Hoyt]

1. The gun culture does not care as long as they have their access to guns -- society can go to hell.

They even freak out when someone comes up with a "smart gun" which would save a lot of innocent lives. Their argument is that they will consider it when police and military use it for a few years. They act like they are facing criminals every day, or are in a war zone.

People who think like that are not rational.

[Electric Monk]

3. Exhibit A

I want. I want. I want. That's all that matters. I want.

[billh58]

2. The right-wing gun lobby

and it's apologists claim that the annual 30,000 deaths from gun violence are just a drop in the bucket, and insignificant because Freedom, Liberty, and Second Amendment. Besides crime rates are going down because Billy Bob Sixpack carries a gun in his pick-em-up truck. Just ask Bundy -- he knows all about right-wing gun toting bigots and rednecks.

The extremist gun culture in this country is not only a laughing stock to the rest of the civilized world, it is a very sick culture which worships an inanimate object as if a gun could bestow power and courage to those who are too paranoid to face the real world.

[billh58]

4. Second Amendment apologists

at once attempt to deny that there is a gun culture in this nation, and at the same time attempt to assert that there is a "culture war" brewing concerning gun rights.

The truth is that yes, there is a right-wing gun culture in this country, which does not include the majority of American gun owners. The mere act of owning a gun does not include membership in the "cold dead hands" society of gun nuttery, nor in the minority Second Amendment absolutist gang (see Bundy "militia&quot . Gun extremists attempt to claim that they speak for ALL American gun owners, but most Americans know that is fanciful fiction on their part.

There is no culture war in this nation except for those manufactured by the neoconservative right-wing in a political and profit-motivated attempt to divide and conquer. Most Americans are in favor of reasonable gun control measures, and only a very vocal minority of gun nuts claim that ANY gun control weakens the Constitution and hinders their ability to overthrow our government by force when necessary, or to exercise summary vigilante justice on other American citizens.

To repeat: There is absolutely no "cultural war" about guns in this country, except in the small minds of gun rights extremists and the right-wing gun lobby.

[billh58]

5. These are the facts that

Second Amendment absolutists and NRA gun humpers try very hard to ignore and deny. They shout that "overall" crime is declining, but the USA remains the leader in gun deaths and injuries throughout Western Civilization -- by many thousands per year.