Gun Control and the NRA

Bernie and I watched the news yesterday and continue our amazement as the true colors of the NRA come out for the public, including its own members, to see. The NRA is organized under a banner of fear, fear for their own lives and the lives of their own. Their greatest fear is an attack by the government. I believe this is the reason why they insist on having storehouses of arms equivalent to that of the military and why they resist any record keeping such as registration of arms. If the government decides to take control, it will first go to those places where it knows guns are amassed.

So great is their fear they are oblivious to the fear of the general citizenry: fear of parents to send their children to school, fear to take one’s family to community celebrations, fear to board an airplane to visit another country, fear to walk the streets of one’s neighborhood.

I cannot deny my own fear, though I refuse to be controlled by fear. It is a hard nut to swallow, the realization that we are the most gun-saturated country in the world and there are countries that post travel warnings for their citizens who want to visit us.

The NRA insists that one solution to the problem of mass murders is more arms and keep the guns out of the hands of those crazy people. But, as I see it, fear is one emotion that can drive a normally sane person to insane behavior becoming one of those crazy people. And they speak with forked tongue…keep the guns out of the hands of crazy people but no record keeping allowed. What about the craziness that people may go through temporarily in their lives? How many lives are saved because someone, going through an emotional and mental crisis had no access to a firearm? Are we supposed to be comforted to know that citizens who share the streets with us are carrying weapons that they may or may not be trained to use or they may or may not be in a good place mentally today?

The idea that those who insist on gun control are talking about the rights of hunters is a myth. The NRA has insisted that this was the case for years because it is what got people riled up enough to support them. I think people are coming to see this today.

I am a pacifist. It has been hard living with the idea that the country I call home has the most powerful army in the world. and the most feared. But this thing, this NRA thing, is a cancer deep within the muscle tissue of America. It is our own cells turned against us.