Jay Maynard, you’ve strung together so many incorrect assertions here that it would take all day to provide the documentation disproving each one. However, in the event you ever get interested enough to research these things, the truth and the proof are out there in the public domain, despite the NRA’s successful lobbying to deny funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for studying the public health costs of gun violence in America.
Since I don’t have time today to point you to the research on all the incorrect info you’ve spammed us with, I’ll have to content myself with this whopper you wrote near the beginning of your post:
“ . . . gun bans and background checks and all of the rest of the current panoply of gun restriction panaceas will do nothing to actually keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them.”
I’d love to know where you got that information because we have so many examples to the contrary it’s astonishing that a gun expert like yourself has never heard the news. Choose any Western democracy, or practically any wealthy nation, outside the United States and compare the gun homicide rate there to the gun homicide rate here, and the difference will make your head spin. The gun homicide rate in the United States is an order of magnitude higher than the other Western democracies (and in some cases two orders of magnitude higher) for one very simple reason: because these countries have common-sense gun laws such as background checks, and they work quite well.
In the United States, roughly 27 people each day, including seven children, are killed by guns every single day of the year. All so men like you can play with your guns.
Here’s some documentation to help you wrap your head around the damage you and the NRA are causing:
Below are a couple of paragraphs from that June 20 New York Times story, published the day after a suspected terrorist killed 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in American history:
“In the United States, the death rate from gun homicides is about 31 per million people — the equivalent of 27 people shot dead every day of the year. The homicides include losses from mass shootings, like Sunday’s (June 19, 2016) Orlando attack, or the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting last December. And of course, they also include the country’s vastly more common single-victim killings.”
“This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.”
In England and Poland, for example, approximately one person per million dies of a gun homicide each year. In Japan, it’s even more rare. One person in 10 million dies of a gun homicide.
In other words, the bad guys who want to spray bullets into a crowd at the nearest elementary school or multiplex or shopping mall can’t get their hands on an AR-15 in Japan and England and Poland, the way you can here. It’s easy to say the bad guy can get any weapon he wants when they’re outlawed, but it’s much more difficult to actually do it, especially when the black market makes the price 10 or 100 times more than it is now. The high school punk who took his mom’s semiautomatic to Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 first-graders can no longer get that gun and destroy dozens of lives while playing at being a bad-ass.
Here’s one reason our gun homicide rate is so high: The United States allows an individual to sell another individual a gun without a background check, and sales at gun shows do not require a background check. I don’t know anybody who favors those kinds of loopholes in background checks, except the NRA. Do you favor those loopholes, Jay? If so, I’d love to know why.
Why is a firearm the only unregulated consumer product in America, when it causes roughly the same number of deaths per year as cars do? Automobiles are regulated nine ways to Sunday. Annual registrations, safety inspections and tax payments. Proficiency testing and licensing for all drivers. More registration, fees and taxes each time a car is bought/sold or moved permanently to another state.
Here’s a statistic that should get anyone’s attention. Jay, did you know that 200 suspected terrorists who were on the no-fly Terror Watch List in 2010 bought the firearms of their choice thanks to you and the NRA? Did you know the NRA lobbied against a recent bill that would have prevented suspected terrorists from buying weapons in the United States, and that it paid $27 million to the Republican Senators who voted against the bill and defeated it? Aren’t you proud of what the NRA is doing year after year using your annual dues? Most of us would call that blood money.
Please, next time, before you spout such tripe, do some research and think about what you’re doing by funding a terrorist organization like the NRA. The Mother Jones investigation into the cost of gun violence in America is a good place to start:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america
