(February 13, 2019 at 10:21 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: ...that's an impressive failure to understand what the NRA is, how they operate, or which political faction contributes to their continued existence......
I think they are more of a sales organization than a lobby. Gun manufacturers give huge amounts of money to the NRA. They don't do it just because the NRA lobbies for them. They do it because the NRA is really effective a promoting gun sales.
Gun related violence in the US is proportionate to the number of guns that exist in the US. When you look at the statistics in terms of incidents of gun violence per gun, then we are no more violent than other nations. Those other countries simply have fewer guns, and not fewer incidents per gun.
When viewed that way, the one thing that you do not want to do is anything that promotes more gun sales. That won't solve the problem, but it will help keep it from growing. There probably is no solution do gun violence that doesn't entail drastically reducing the number of guns that are out there. And that is a real tough sell in the US. Since gun violence directly correlates to number of guns, then we would have to reduce the number of guns by half, just to reduce incidents of gun violence by half. I see no way of taking that many guns out of people's hands without one hell of a lot of push back. So much so, that I think that it isn't possible.
That makes me think that using gun control to save lives just isn't a very effective use of our time and resources. If saving lives is what we want to do, then there are more productive veins to work in. For example, cars kill as many people as guns. And cars are really bad for the environment. We really should be actively working on reducing the number of cars on the road. And if we reduce the number of cars by half, then we will have probably reduced fatalities by quite a bit more than half.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.