Wil…sorry, but you just did tell me “fuck you”. The NRA is me. I’m a proud Benefactor Life Member. It represents my interests before a Congress and a leftist news media that — make no mistake; their actions tell the real story — wants to take away every firearm I own. Yes, including that nasty eeeeevil AR-15.
You are arguing against the Left’s strawman definition of the NRA. Yes, the NRA does indeed work to preserve the right of every law-abiding American to keep and bear arms. Read that sentence again. The words law-abiding are there for a reason. They no more want criminals and terrorists to acquire firearms than you or I do. What they realize, and you don’t, is that 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.
The gun manufacturers and gun dealers don’t run the NRA. Look at its board of directors. They’re common everyday people, just like me. (And even you. Remember Charlton Heston? Another rich Hollywood type.) The NRA and the gun manufacturers and dealers and owners that it’s acceptable for the Left to hate so virulently — and your words drip with that hate — do indeed care about Americans getting murdered. Not just the few that are killed by police, but the thousands killed in job lots by criminals and thugs in America’s inner cities. But they also know that those criminals and thugs can and will get their hands on a gun any time they want to, and laws won’t even slow them down. They’re criminals. What difference does breaking another law mean to them?
The culture of violence radiates from our inner cities, and it’s not because of anything the NRA or the firearms industry has done to promote it. It comes from the culture that glorifies violence and drugs and considers anyone working to raise themselves out of it by work and education a traitor to be shunned. If you look at the country, aside from the inner cities, the statistics look a hell of a lot more like Switzerland than the Left likes to admit.
And none of the measures the Left is flogging as the solution to the problem would have gotten in the way of the Dallas shooter getting his firepower. He was a veteran of the Army. He knew what to do and how. Until he was whipped into a frenzy of hatred by those seeking to use the publicized shootings by police for their own ends, he was the kind of person that the Left likes to hold up as “responsible gun owners”.
The problem in Dallas wasn’t the gun. It was the race-baiting-fueled hate that pulled the trigger.
I do indeed care about the guy who was innocently open carrying. Black, brown, white, whatever, it doesn’t matter. He was exercising his rights under the laws of Texas. I happen to think that what he did was st00pid, because it was needlessly inflammatory. I’m reasonably sure the NRA agrees with me; their position is that open carry is a bad idea for that same reason. Nevertheless, it was reasonable for police to investigate him. Whether the steps they took to do so are themselves reasonable is a matter that will probably be settled in a court of law.
Was the Dallas shooter rising up against a government grown tyrannical, as the Founding Fathers intended to ensure the right of Americans to do with the Second Amendment? I’m sure he thought so. Individual action such as his is not going to achieve the desired results, as he learned the hardest way of all. If you want to see a real armed uprising, just try to take Americans’ guns, as an Australia-style ban would require. Go ahead, institute the house-to-house searches by heavily armed SWAT teams. (There’s considerable reason to believe the US military would refuse an order to do the job themselves.) The result would be a bloodbath.
The reign of terror in the US is not the doing of the NRA. It’s the doing of government policies that have destroyed the inner cities and the families that lived there and the economic opportunities that made them livable. Get rid of the thug culture of the inner city, and many, many problems will go away with it.
Demonizing gun owners and those who conduct lawful commerce in firearms and the NRA that represents them is not helping, it’s hurting. It’s taking away attention from the real causes of violence. It’s not the gun, it’s the hand that fires it, that’s the problem.