Have you been on youtube lately? Have you seen all the gun porn?
The kids are pissed, the kids that are graduating in June will be voting in November. They’re inspiring a whole lot of 20 and 30-somethings to finally get off their asses to go vote. May the ideals and energy of the nation’s youth prevail.
The protest in Ann Arbor will be at Pioneer High School on Main Street at Stadium Boulevard. I hope it’s epic.
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I don’t doubt that there are many people who love their guns very much. The thing I find naïve is the notion that American legislators are siding with the NRA because of their respect for Second Amendment absolutists rather than the NRA’s campaign contributions. If the NRA didn’t think all those millions of dollars were having a major effect on gun legislation then they wouldn’t be spending that money in the first place.
If American gun policy has anything to do with what the American people actually want then we would already have much stricter requirements for owning firearms and a lot more restrictions on the kinds of guns private citizens could own. Polls have shown that even within the NRA, most-rank-and-file members support things like stricter background checks.
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I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around US politics, but if you think the 5 figure sums that get thrown around are enough to “buy” a politician at the national level, you’ve got another thing coming. There are hard limits on how much groups can give to politicians
There are no limits, though, on how much a group can spend to mobilize its members. I’ve worked with/around/against politicians here for more than 20 years now. A check for $10k gets you a Christmas card. Bringing 10,000 constituents out to vote in an organized fashion? That gets you personal phone calls and a lot more.
And here is the Problem.
There is a Sizeable portion of the population, that votes, that see these kids as nothing more then mindless sheep who are advocating to have RIGHTS TAKEN AWAY in a response to a statistical anomaly. (Mass shootings only make up 1.4% of gun homicides in the US) This population see kids want the very government they see as tyrannical to take away guns. They ask ‘why should we listen to children who a few months ago were eating laundry detergent?’ They asked “How come there is no coverage of Blaine Gaskill, a good guy with a gun, who stopped the Maryland shooting?”
This is a country that voted for a Reality TV Star and scam artist to be President. If we cannot answer these questions, then there will be no meaningful gun control and March For Our Lives will be the next Occupied Wall Street, I.E a wasted opportunity.
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Exactly. I hear the passion these kids speak with, and I respect it. But when they scream that NRA members like me have blood on our hands? That’s where it ends.
I own an AR. I keep it locked up, take it to the range, or out on to the back 40 w/ water bottles and assorted fruit. How do I have blood on my hands? When I hear that, my gut reaction is “Molon Labe.”
That doesn’t help anyone, and it doesn’t help us find common ground.
In my state a recent petition for a ballot measure was put forward for the November that would, in short, ban ALL semi-auto rifles and require current owners to either surrendered their weapons or register them. https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/21/oregon-initiative-would-ban-assault-rifles-require-owners-surrender-weapons/444530002/
(So basically banning the Ruger Mini-14 and allowing the M1 Grand.)
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Looks like it would also catch the Ruger 10-22, the best plinking gun the world has ever seen. I let my 9 year old shoot the 10-22 with supervision. And yet it appears to be an “assault weapon.” God help anyone who tried to assault anything bigger than a squirrel with a 10-22.
Yet another point that pushes people like me ever closer to Molon Labe and away from discussion.
If you’re one of those suckers who pays membership dues to a virulently right-wing organisation that’s already well funded by the arms industry it exists to lobby on behalf of, you kind of do (metaphorically speaking). If you’re an unpaid member (e.g. due to participating in a tournament) that’s a different matter, but really we’d be better off without the whole organisation.
Lapierre and his bunch aren’t interested in helping anyone find common ground. They’re interested in making sure that a majority of right-wing politicians are in place who’ll try to squelch even the most common sense firearms safety laws, and they’ll resort to anything (lies and fallacies out of the Bernays playbook, suppression of scientific research, race-baiting, etc.) to make that happen. If you’re a responsible owner of firearms who wants to find common ground and have an informed and nuanced public debate you really should find a better organisation to support than the NRA.
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By supporting policies that ensure less responsible people (like the Parkland shooter) face few if any barriers for getting their hands on such a weapon.
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NRA does education work, they’ve got an absolutely kick-ass firing range I can use. My kids learned safe handling from their materials.
And they do a good job of making sure that people like me don’t get shouted down in the debate. I don’t want crazy people to have guns. I don’t want criminals to have guns. NICS needs to be fixed ASAP. People who should be in the system must be entered into the system.
But don’t take away my rights. I’m not part of the problem. Please don’t treat me like I’m part of the problem.
And that’s why flyover country people like me get angry. Any attempt at discussion ends up with a blood libel.
Molon Labe.
Those things could be and are done by orgs and private companies that don’t exist to lobby for the firearms industry.
By resorting to the kind of tactics I mentioned above, mainly in the service of the sales numbers for firearms manufacturers. You lose all credibility as a responsible firearms owner when you materially support or defend this rotten organisation.
If you’re defending the NRA, you are part of the problem. Really, read those links and tell me they’re serving the cause of reasonable and honest debate.
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Stop it with the pseudo-populist “flyover country” nonsense. There are gun owners in every state of the Union, including California and New York and Massachusetts, and some of them are wealthy liberals. As much as the NRA likes to paint it as such, this isn’t about the Real America™ vs. Coastal Elites any more than it is about holding the pass at Thermopylae.
Also, the term “blood libel” has a very specific meaning. There are far more appropriate terms one can use to bewail one’s martyrdom for supporting a right-wing populist organisation that uses Der Stuermer-style portraits of Jewish puppetmasters in its literature.
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Forgive me, I do get a bit upset at being told that little ol me, who has never injured another human being, has the blood of children on my hands. There are reasonable solutions out there. They don’t involve outlawing entire classes of weapons.
Until people like me, who want to talk about this, who have kids in public schools, who also happen to be gun owners, can be met with something remotely reasonable, then people like me will continue to walk away, and nothing will happen. And that’s a damn tragedy.
There’s a simple way to avoid being characterised as such: stop giving money to or defending the NRA. Until people like you, who want to talk about this, who have kids in public schools, who also happen to be gun owners stop supporting an organisation that traffics in unreasonable rhetoric, then people like you won’t be taken seriously by reasonable people (including the firearms owners I know who take me to the range a couple of times a year – veterans who’ve fired fully automatic weapons).
As for a damned tragedy, try no legislative action to prevent a repeat of some circumstances leading to the deaths of 20 kindergarten students. Fortunately for all of us, the contemporaries of those kids, who’ve lived with the NRA’s blood-soaked obstructionism all their lives, are now growing up, finding their voices, achieving voting age, and are fed up. The NRA and its supporters can either adjust to the new demographic reality or end up on the ash heap of history.
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Well, not much left to say after that. Other than this:
Molon Labe
Entire classes of weapons, from full-auto firearms to flamethrowers to tactical nuclear devices, are already outlawed or heavily restricted on the grounds that they have no legitimate non-military purpose. Even if this is an infringement on the right to keep and bear arms, most reasonable people, and I think you fall in that category, can see the logic in this.
Extending such restrictions to semi-automatic magazine-fed firearms, in the face of the ongoing series of mass killings, doesn’t have to mean the end of the Second Amendment. The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, but famously not the right to shout “Fire” in a crowded theater.
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I wonder if he was actually buried with a weapon. I’m totally opposed to grave robbing, but if he was I might make an exception if someone was willing to follow through and show that it’s as easy to pry a pistol from his cold dead hands as it was for the Persians to take away the spears of the dead Spartans in the aftermath of Thermopylae.
Speaking of that, it’s also amusing how the oft-repeated (esp. in this thread) historical phrase refers the right to bear arms as it applies specifically to the masters in a slave-holding society, who used their spears to prevent domestic revolts as much as they did to hold off foreign invaders. History isn’t the strong suit of the NRA and its supporters.
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It’s actually all the cold dead children that we’re concerned about.
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