Stupidity, thy name is NRA
Thu Jan 24, 2008 at 10:04:10 PM PDT
This is utterly whacked:
VA State senators voted to defeat a bill that would have required everyone undergo a background check when they purchase a firearm at a gun show. The legislation, backed by families of the Virginia Tech shooting victims, was to close a loophole that allows criminals and the mentally ill to buy firearms at gun shows without a background check.
Can't say for sure, but maybe those State Senators felt a bit of pressure from all the folks I saw in the lobby of the General Assembly building wearing these ridiculous red stickers reading: "Guns Save Lives"
This bit of pathetic theater was most interesting, coming right on the heels of their old slogan "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Do they save, or don't they kill? And what about the boatloads of evidence that suggests these slogans are so many vapid lies? Like some of these snippets:
Guns kept in the home for self-protection are more often used to kill somebody you know than to kill in self-defense; 22 times more likely, according to a 1998 study by the Journal of Trauma.
(Kellermann AL. "Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home." Journal of Trauma, 1998; 45(2):263-67)
In 1999, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, there were only 154 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens with a firearm compared with a total of 8,259 firearm murders in the United States.
The risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.
(Kellermann AL. "Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home." Journal of Trauma, 1998; 45(2):263-67.)
The risk of suicide is five times greater in households with guns.
(Kellermann, AL, Rivara FP, Somes G, et al. "Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership." New England Journal of Medicine. 1992; 327: 467-472.)
From 1999 to 2004, firearms were responsible for 18% of injury deaths for Caucasian teens ages 13-19 in the United States, 51% of deaths for African-American teens, 31% of Hispanic teens, 18% of Native American/Alaska Native teens, and 19% of Asian/Pacific Islander teens.
(WISQARS, Injury Mortality Reports; WISQARS, Nonfatal Injury Reports.
WISQARS, Injury Mortality Reports.)
In fact, most pro-gun organizations are skilled at the gun control-crime control debate. But it is very difficult for the N.R.A. or anyone else to muster a cogent argument against the scientific study of data on gun injuries, or against attempts to protect children from being harmed by guns, or against a serious effort to reduce the number of spouses who are killed because an argument spiraled out of control. In short, there are no good arguments to be made. Guns don't make you safer statistically, they make you dead.
Just on it's own merits, let's see if we can work through the NRA's logic. Guns are inanimate objects triggered by people, therefore, they don't kill anyone by themselves. They require a 'human' trigger finger. Okay. But doesn't the same hold true if your Gun is going to save someone? Does it just pull a trigger on its own? Throw the guy a life line or what? Nope, that trigger still needs a person's finger, doesn't it? I mean, by their own logic, if guns don't kill people, they don't save people either, right?
But why worry? These are just slogans from one of the most powerful lobbying organizations on earth. That they are utterly disconnected from reality and irrational plus internally inconsistent doesn't matter, does it? Do all the dead at Virginia Tech matter? How about all the murders from handguns on our city streets, accidental and otherwise?
Maybe that's why individuals in the NRA seem so hard pressed to prevent purely sensible controls on guns that anyone in their right minds would want. Look, even if I'm packing twenty Glocks I don't want to meet a mentally deficient, emotionally whacked individual armed to the teeth as well. It's just nuts to think we can't pass these kind of lowest common denominator laws that prevent criminals and the mentally ill from arming themselves to the hilt.
But we can't. Because the NRA says we can't. Because a pack of NRA supporting morons wear idiotic stickers that intimitate state legislators into overriding common sense.
I'll say it again: this is whacked.
If you support the NRA, go back to your caves and your gun shows. I don't even want to talk with you. YOU are the problem. When someone puts a bullet in your noggin, or your sons' or daughters' noggin, I'll be more than happy to pry that weapon of choice from your cold, dead fingers. Then I'll bury the goddamned thing. In this way we'll rid the world of two great harms: dangerous weapons and the fools that blindly support their use.
Permalink | 50 comments