Improved rifle competency and gun safety!
No, wait. That was the issue they were founded for before they were taken over decades later by a bunch of extremist zealots who effectively advocate the opposite.
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The NRA could be doing a lot of good right now to instill a sense of responsibility in U.S. gun culture like we see in Switzerland. I’ve no doubt that many NRA members see this as one of their duties but it seems like a collective failure to communicate when your most well-known and oft-repeated mantra is “From my cold dead hands”.
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It’s not just a message they are failing to communicate, it’s antithetical to their stated positions. If the NRA cared first and foremost about responsible gun ownership then they’d support bills to require safety training and licensing as a condition of owning a gun.
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I’d suggest a march is fine, but judging from what I’ve seen it would be more accurate, and perhaps more intellectually honest and perhaps more effective, to simply make it a march for the environment.
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That was hardly the only issue at hand though. The NIH, cancer research, vaccination etc. are under attack by anti-science zealots too.
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Given that environmental issues need to be addressed collectively, from the state and even transnational level, I can see why it’s central. But as @Brainspore noted, other issues are on the table.
I guess maybe I don’t get what you’re actually objecting to here?
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Eh, I’m not going to go to the mat for it but it’s the sloppy semantics, if it were labeled “March for Science Funding plus Climate Change Action”, I would find that more honest. Science is a tool for informing ourselves about the world; what to actually do with that information is politics, and it seems to me the march was more about the latter, NTTAWWT.
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And oh-so catchy too!
But really that slogan doesn’t come close to encompassing all the issues at play here. In the most general sense the protesters are united in their alarm of this administration’s dismissive attitude toward objective reality.
That includes issues like research funding and climate change, but also issues like science education and public health and evidence-based policy. We have powerful decision makers in the top levels of government who believe that the Earth is less than six thousand years old.
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Right? Science has already been politicized. The entire academy has been!
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The original earth day was political.
http://www.earthday.org/about/the-history-of-earth-day/
It wasn’t scientific-- because the scientists who worked for DOW, and the scientists who worked for Los Alamos, and the scientists who worked for big business-- weren’t all that interested in what the biologists, ecologists, and conservationists might have to say.
Now the tables have turned, and in a sense, science is pretty firmly on the side of the environmentalists. And rather than listen to this scientific understanding of the world, people such as trump have chosen to denigrate the process itself.
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So are GMO’s. Anyone attending notice a pro-GMO banner or shirt?
The signs could say “Spend More Tax Money On Things That We Like” and thus be re-usable for other causes in the future. Sustainability win!
Plenty, actually. Though there are also valid reasons why pro-science people might be skeptical/conflicted about the way GMOs are regulated, licensed and distributed.
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Glad to hear it.
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