The NRA

The NRA has 4 million members. In a country of 350 million that’s not many, yet they seem to wield a disproportionate amount of power.

So here are a few thoughts about this. I’m not anti-gun, but I am pro-people. To my mind the death toll is simply too great and so the non-sensate item (guns) will have to be controlled.

Gun owners make a lot of claims about needing to “defend” themselves. Yet almost no one looks at the statistics. How many people have legitimately used a gun to defend themselves in the last 12 months? And how does that stack up against the 12,000 gun murders annually racked up? I suspect that almost the only people who do actually use guns for defense are police officers. The defense argument is at best spurious for the average citizen.

Similarly the argument about needing guns to defend our liberties and rights is nonsense. Any government that aims to tyrannize a population is going to have tanks, bazookas, drones, helicopter gunships, and so on. Oh, and lots of troops. If anyone thinks a semi-automatic weapon is going to make the slightest dent in that sort of fire power he/she has been watching too many Rambo films. Such a person is delusional and should not be allowed to have any kind of weapon.

People do exist who want to resist our government, of course. They are extremists like Al Qaeda, which exists right here in the USA, and those folks just love that they can get their hands on assault rifles so easily. Plus they really truly deeply want to die for their cause. Oh, and they want to kill you, too. If we asked them they might well say they are simply a “well-regulated militia” exercising their first amendment rights. Is this what we want?

Then we have the mental health discussion. It’s worth noting that a person has to show that he or she is not sane in order to be denied gun ownership. The trouble is that as a normal factor we assume that all people are sane -often without any evidence. Yet we also know that 1 in 4 Americans will at some point in their lives seek medical help for depression – a formidable ailment that leads on occasions to violence, suicide, and suicide-by-police. That’s about 85 million people to think about. This does not take into account the total number of people who self-medicate with drugs and alcohol.

It would be nice if everyone were sensible, sane, and well balanced. But the numbers suggest otherwise. And so we may need to do something about this.