The NRA crossed the Rubicon a long time ago from being a grassroots political organization to simply being the lobbying arm of an industry that makes its money promoting murder and mayhem, yet if anything their reach continues to expand through corruption of state governments and the psychotic terrorist politics of its most deranged members. And yet, while there are plenty of gun control advocates and organizations, somehow there is a level of tolerance of the NRA that is surreal given the violent insanity and moral disintegration it empowers. Women in so many places can barely even seek family planning counseling without enduring a gauntlet of shrieking nutjobs pushing pictures of aborted fetuses into their faces, but events dedicated to celebrating and legally deifying instruments of mass murder are treated as normal and community-oriented as a school bake sale.
So I have to ask: When are people who value human life over some Pharisee interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (largely created by the millionaires who make the guns, and who will never personally experience the consequences of their politics) going to have the courage of their convictions? When will the plain, unvarnished truth that this organization's influence on American politics is directly responsible for knowingly enabling acts of mass murder affect how communities respond to it? Their Orwellian inverse-morality would be bad enough, but when that kind of insanity is deliberately concentrated in service to the financial interests of the firearms industry, that is far worse: This industry is the fully knowing logistical arm of every drug cartel and street gang in America (and Mexico, for that matter), and radically enhances the lethal potential of every form of tyranny, hatred, crime of passion, act of stupidity, childhood irresponsibility, and mental illness the human condition is capable of. Maybe it's time to treat the NRA as what it is - i.e., what it does.
Suppose your back yard is found to be contaminated with a lethal toxin. Now imagine that you live in the up-is-down moral and intellectual universe of the NRA - how can you best protect your family from this danger? Why, obviously, you would try to get even more of this toxin and spread it around your house and community, because the way to avoid being killed by something deadly is to make sure it's fucking everywhere.
What do you do if you find a live explosive in your basement from the former owners? Whatever you do, do not call the bomb squad to safely dispose of it - no, of course not. What you should do is buy more explosives and wire up your whole house! Hell, wire up your whole city, your whole state, your whole country. In fact, hook them up to a detonator that may trigger them at any moment with the same probability as being murdered or committing suicide with a gun. Would you feel safe in this situation? The NRA says you should. After all, you might end up in a Michael Bay movie where you have to blow up the house because it's being invaded by alien robots.
I support the 2nd Amendment - the real 2nd Amendment, that talks about people having the practical ability to defend their families and, in times of national emergency, form a well-regulated militia subject to civil authority and legal accountability. The 2nd Amendment invented by the NRA, however, does not exist anywhere in American law, and is not supported by any sane and remotely decent human being: Stray bullets and crossfire do not make safer communities. Bullets do not have names on them, and even if they reach their intended target, they do not necessarily stop there. Unless you have a credible reason to believe you're being targeted, no law-abiding citizen has a reason to carry a concealed weapon. And no law-abiding citizen period has a reason to own weapons specifically designed and optimized to kill as many people as possible. None, zero, zilch.
No matter how extensive the firepower of a private entity, there is no possibility that you could fight on an even footing with a modern military that possesses combat aircraft, satellites, cruise missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons, so there isn't even that deranged excuse to fall back on: Every crazy domestic militia that takes on the federal government through force of arms is simply annihilated, and that's going up against law enforcement armed with just a limited few of the weapons available to the military and at least usually restrained in their conduct by being officers of law. The one and only thing weapons of war in the hands of private citizens can do is murder and terrorize ordinary people in the community - i.e., to take away the freedom of everyone else.
That's the despicable, anti-American hypocrisy at the dark heart of the NRA and the extremist gun movement in general, and communities all across America - particularly in inner cities - suffer the tyranny of monsters armed with weapons of war every day, and arming themselves has not allowed the people of those communities to free themselves from such bastards. Instead, the fear becomes even more ubiquitous, because they never know where the bullets will be coming from, and you can't shoot back at a stray bullet. One gangbanger shoots another, and the bullets keep going. Cops shoot someone who drew on them, and the bullets keep going. A convenience store clerk and a robber have a shootout, and the bullets keep going. Or it could just be something more universal and not limited to inner cities - a jealous lover, a drunk idiot messing around, a kid playing with the "toy" he found, or just someone who's crazy. The bullets keep going then too. As does the pain. Lives, families, and entire communities destroyed, and there's no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again once that happens.
So I have this to say to the NRA and its fellow traveler extremists who go batshit at the suggestion of sensible gun regulation: You make other people pay in blood for your fun, your totally irrational sense of false security, and your corrupt lies about the Constitution. No amount of blood is too much for other people to pay. You dirty, evil, stupid fucks.
7:34 PM PT: Additional thought: Isn't it ironic and sickening that the gun movement is so closely associated with the Forced Birth movement? They're so full of self-righteous outrage over the death of a fetus. How many actual children with thoughts and feelings are killed or maimed because of the ubiquity of guns in this country? And they don't give a fuck. Not a single, solitary fuck. Bastards.