Oh Yeah, We Still Have a Fucking Gun Problem In This Country…

[trailmonkee]

opinion from the political garbage chute

Six months ago a mentally-ill young man with an AR-15 shot and killed twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the aftermath of the shooting, the nation was justifiably outraged. Well, I should be very clear here the vast majority of us were outraged. The NRA’s executive board, headed by Wayne LaPierre? I can’t really say what their reaction was, but it certainly wasn’t outrage. They immediately began scrambling their forces to sabotage any earnest effort to tighten up gun laws as a response to the tragedy. You would think that if anything would get our elected officials to stand up to a bunch of profiteering scumbags like the NRA’s board, it would be the nightmare of bullets and blood that ended those children’s lives. You’d be wrong though.

The NRA managed to spread a lie about the Toomey-Manchin bipartisan background check bill that it would lead to a national registry, and if there’s one thing John Q. Gun-Hoarding-Asshole can’t stand, it’s the idea of the country knowing he has a gun. Well, except for the fifteen pictures a day he posts on Facebook page, but he’s doing that voluntarily damn it! So with the gun zealots in lather over a gun registry — which the amendment specifically outlawed — just enough Republican Senators were intimidated into not backing the amendment and it died short of the 60 vote mark prescribed in the Constitution. Oh wait, no, that’s just a threshold established by obstructionist assclowns on the right. My apologies.

In the six months since the shooting at Newtown, thousands of people have died and been injured by guns, and yet the message coming out of Gun Hoarder Land is “nothing wrong here, keep moving, nothing to see.” The problem for that crowd though? There’s a lot to see. For instance, you can see that Santa Monica College just saw a dramatic and violent conclusion to a shooting rampage that started in the surrounding area and ended on the campus of the city college. You can see it in the story of a man in Arizona who brought his four-year-0ld son to a friend’s house and wound up being accidentally shot when his child found his friend’s gun and discharged it into his father. Or you can get really depressed reading a story about two shootings involving two different four year old kids in two different states in a single three-day span, does that drive home just how much a problem with guns we have this country?

No? Let’s try one more…how about twelve people being shot in six hours in Chicago?

Something’s got to give. I know we’re probably never going to get to the point where we can ask people to hand in any guns they don’t really need — you know, keep a couple for your protection and hunting purposes, and then hand over the rest of the cache — but we have to fix this issue from every angle possible. You want to talk about mental health issues? Fine, but you better be willing to move to a universal healthcare system because good luck paying for the kinds of sweeping overhauls and widely available mental healthcare facilities that are going to be needed without one. Want to enforce already existing laws better? Great! I’m all for that, but I hope you’re willing to pay higher taxes so we can hire more cops and public defenders. We also cannot be deterred in writing the kinds of common sense laws that are needed to curb the flow of guns into the black market as well as encourage responsible gun ownership. The numbers have been shouted so many times, but it bears repeating — far more people have died in this country as a result of gun crime or accident than have died in all the terrorist attacks combined.

Shouldn’t the real Department of Homeland Security be working with legislators to draft a Federal trafficking law or some other form of gun legislation that helps make tracking down illegal firearms easier? Nothing is more frustrating for me than watching America not learn from its mistakes. We can’t ban all guns, and we can’t ignore the problem and hope it goes away. The worst part about all the “scandals” that are rocking Washington right now is that they completely distract us from the issues we knew we had to fix just six months ago. Sandy Hook was and still is the wake-up call this country needs.

Yes, I’m worried about just how much we let the NSA swoop up without warrants, but while we’re hand-wringing over government programs that we all pretty much just assumed existed anyway, dozens upon dozens of our fellow Americans are dying needlessly because we can’t tell the gun lobby to go fuck themselves. If we don’t hold Congress accountable, if by next November we have simply shrugged our shoulders on the gun control issue — shame on us. Honestly, these few hundred words have been more a cathartic exercise than anything else. I’ve committed thousands of them to this cause, and the facts of the case remain the same.

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[Robb]

1. Righteous.

[badtoworse]

2. "we can't tell the gun lobby to go fuck themselves"

I think you're finally getting it. Why don't you try making a deal? I'm a strong RKBA defender, but I'd be willing to deal on the issue. Accepting "go fuck yourself"? What kind of a reaction were you expecting?

[Robb]

3. Are you a gun lobbyist?

I don't think this is directed at you otherwise.

[badtoworse]

4. I believe in protecting ALL of our civil rights.

We are losing them incrementally at an alarming rate. The gun control crowd wants to just surrender 2nd Amendment rights. I'm not willing to do that. I support groups that defend my civil rights.

[Grisbald]

5. Yes, the bill would have led to a National Registry

I know that there was verbage in their amendment stating otherwise, but common sense would tell you that in order for a Universal Background check to work, all firearms would have to be registered. Otherwise the system would not know if a private sell took place.