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Ah, America, the home of the free and the land of the …. dead. Mass murders have become so common that there’s even a website that tracks the number of wacko murders (shootingtracker.com), which stands at 314 right now for 2015; but hey, we have almost three months left.
Of course, Roseburg bumps the number to 315. But, amid all this carnage, the Second Amendment is safe from the black helicopters of Obama’s gun nabbers. So a few thousand may be dead, but at least we can all own our own AK-47!
Sigh. Our gun laws are so idiotic. And our gun laws are that way, in large part, because the National Rifle Association is full of evil people.
This is not an understatement, and I am not another Bambi-loving, wilted-flower-wearing, gun-despising ultra-liberal. I’ve been near guns all my life, since my father and his two brothers operated – for 51 years – Quarteroni Brothers Hunting and Fishing Store in Swoyersville. (Sadly, the store closed some years ago.)
I played in our store as a child, I sold rifles and pistols there for years and I have owned, and used, shotguns, handguns and rifles for decades, first as a hunter and later as a hobbyist.
I tell you sincerely that over our store’s oiled wooden floor I have seen, up close and far too personally, just who it is that is buying and bearing arms by the untold millions.
The majority were and are law-abiding and peaceful. Some, however, shouldn’t have been outdoors without a keeper, let alone buying firearms. But all they had to do on quiet Kelly Street was plunk down their money and take home that constitutional Ithaca 16-gauge pump shotgun or H&R .22 pistol or Remington .30-06 rifle.
We’d read about some of our patrons over the years, after they’d aerated a neighbor in a dispute over 10 inches of fence line or gone after a friend after 16 hours of social drinking or threatened the odd landlord.
We’d remember, shake our heads and go on to the next patron who was keeping the UN’s black helicopters at bay by buying a .44 Magnum pistol or three.
And it was – and is – all legal. If you have the money, you can get the gun, if not at department or neighborhood stores like ours, then at gun shows, or from friends or neighbors. The sad fact is that it remains terrifyingly easy for anyone – anyone – to get his or her hands on a gun.
It’s legal, it’s the American way and it’s scary.
I know guns and I’m terrified by the firepower out there, essentially unregulated and out of control. I’m horrified by the frenzied, wanton killing all across the country. I want it to stop.
You can’t drive, get married or even become a minister without first obtaining a license, but you can buy weapons galore just because you feel like it.
It’s a sick situation, for everyone but the NRA brain trust. I go ballistic when I hear the NRA leadership spouting the party line: A gun didn’t kill those people in the that movie theater, a mentally unbalanced individual did. We don’t need to ban cop-killer bullets, they’re fine for hunting squirrels. God, yes, it’s every American’s right to own and possess an assault rifle with extra long banana clip. We are opposed to the proposed gun-control legislation in (fill in the state, county, city, village or town) because, if it passes, it will be the government’s first step in taking away all our rights.
These people did inhale. I can’t believe anyone could be so venal, cruel and shameless as to utter the tripe they do, but they do, all the while using their enormous war chest to influence countless elections and keep those “Saturday night specials” legally available to all.
Even though I tend to see everything in shades of gray, I can at least thank the NRA leadership for allowing me to look in their direction and say, simply, “You are evil.”
It fits. The first definition of evil in my “Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary” is this: “A. Adj. The antithesis of GOOD in all its principal senses.”
And in this dialectic the NRA is exactly that. Evil; unwavering; monolithic in its institutionalized beliefs; willing, ready and able to steamroll anyone or anything in its path to get its way, damn the consequences, or the people.
“The strongest lobby in America isn’t big business, isn’t big oil, it’s big gun,” U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said, urging Americans “to stand up and say we’ve lost too many children.”
We have. We do. We will, until we put down our guns. And that isn’t likely as long as the NRA continues to stand for No Rational Arguments and No Reality Allowed.
But the NRA’s big lie continues to convince Americans that without our precious guns we are in peril.
Sadly, we know all too well that there’s a very real possibility that “the great masses of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”
Adolph Hitler wrote that in “Mein Kampf” in 1933.