PULLMAN, Wash. (U-WIRE) — The National Rifle Association, which represents the interests of responsible gun owners and mass murderers alike — and their right to load “cop-killer” bullets — is out of control.
Proof of this can be seen in the way they’ve recently taken a firm stance against gun safety. In April, Smith & Wesson, the largest gun maker in the United States, made a deal with the U.S. government.
They’ve agreed to some reforms — things like making triggers too heavy and grips too large for children to fire, and making anyone who buys more than one gun wait two weeks to get the rest. In exchange for this, Smith & Wesson gets immunity from some of the cities and states suing the gun industry for costs incurred when residents get blown away.
Shooting rampages are no longer news in the United States, unless the death toll is especially large or the shooter especially young, so this kind of agreement makes sense.
Predictably, the NRA is horrified by Smith & Wesson’s new safety guidelines, even though the changes make it harder for little kids to get their heads blown off. They even tried to start a boycott of the company for “being the first gun maker to raise the white flag of defeat.”
How exactly is Smith & Wesson succumbing to defeat by modifying their products so they’re less likely to kill people?
In the past, gun manufacturers Ruger, Sturm and Colt have started modest safety reforms and have been met with NRA-led consumer boycotts.
Lobbying by the NRA is far-reaching, and their efforts almost always pay off. We can thank them for laws that let convicted felons retain their legal right to buy a gun, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms being allowed to inspect gun dealers unannounced only once a year, and loopholes that leave private gun sales unregulated.
The NRA is currently fighting to keep sales at gun shows free of background checks similar to the ones that have stopped over 400,000 people from buying guns under the Brady Bill.
They’re also spending money to crush a Democratic proposal to create a database of “ballistic fingerprints,” which would allow law enforcement to track guns used in multiple crimes.
In Maryland, assault rifles and “Saturday Night Specials” were recently banned, despite an opposing TV ad campaign by the NRA.
The NRA is, however, opposed to a law that would allow concealed handguns in schools if the principal knows who has them. They’re against it because they think the law should be unrestricted — they don’t want anyone to know who’s packing heat in the places our young people are sent to learn.
In the United States we register our cars, but not our guns.
There are more regulations for manufacturing a toy gun than a real one. So what kind of ethics is the NRA abiding by?
I guess for responsible gun owners, mowing down toddlers in a day-care isn’t their motivation for stockpiling arms, like it was for Buford Furrow last August. For them, going out to the woods and shooting a gun at a target or an unarmed animal is a lot of fun. But an ethical person would give up that right gladly if it meant there’s less chance of an innocent person being shot in the face.
Last month, Kayla Roland, a first-grader, took a bullet in the head from a classmate. She died. Just like the 87 people who also die every day in America from gun violence, according to Newsweek.
NRA hard-liners, who seem to long for the day when gun ownership is mandatory, would have us believe that the nonstop series of bloodbaths that take place in our schools and workplaces have little to do with the 240 million guns in America, despite what that communist rat bastard Bill Clinton says.
Never mind that law-enforcement unions support the president because he wants to limit the number of assault rifles on the street. Clinton wants to regulate our weapons of mass destruction, so he is either Hitler or Satan.
I guess the more sensible members of the NRA justify their membership in an immoral organization because they fear gun-control advocates — the so-called “gun grabbers” — want to ban all guns. Many of them would argue that small-caliber rifles are not the problem.
David Koon is not one of these people. His daughter was shot dead with a .22 right after she was raped, and now Koon is pushing for tougher gun legislation in New York. In his Newsweek commentary “The United States of Arms,” writer Jonathan Freedland asks why America can’t rid itself of guns.
“The rest of the world has done just that — with tiny homicide rates to prove it. Non-Americans look on in disbelief at the impotence of the world’s only superpower in the face of this mass domestic arsenal. We watch the pictures from Jonesboro, Littleton, Atlanta and now suburban Los Angeles and let our jaws drop.”
Maybe the reason Freedland doesn’t understand America’s gun problem is because he’s spoiled. After all, he’s from Britain, where guns are banned and there were 64 gun-related homicides in 1997. Of course, the population of the United States is five times larger. But that doesn’t explain why we had over 190 fatal shootings for every one of theirs that year.
Guns may have been a necessary part of life in colonial America, but the situation is a little different these days, hundreds of years later.
Although the number of gun-related homicides in America is into the thousands each year, the NRA still worships the Second Amendment, which was written in 1787, many years before humanity was graced with Uzis, AK-47s and Mac-10s.
Mac-10s have been outlawed, thankfully, but that didn’t stop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from using a legal variation of one to turn Columbine High into a shooting gallery.
How can the NRA be against sensible laws that don’t ban guns in the United States, but would reduce the number of people intentionally and accidentally killed with them each year?
They must be missing each week’s new statistics, polls and piles of dead bodies, all of which point to the need for gun control.
Nathan Mauger’s column originally appeared in Wednesday’s Washington State University paper, the Daily Evergreen.