"We have no collective will in this country to make sure such a day never happens again." Agree?

[napkinz]

After Aurora, Michael Tomasky on the Country the NRA Wants to See

by Michael Tomasky
July 21, 2012

Don’t believe those who say we will prevent horrific shootings. This is the America we live in now.

If there’s one thing I hate hearing at times like this, it’s that violin-music language about how we must work to ensure that something like the Aurora shooting “never happens again.” I can understand why it makes people feel better in some way to say it. But really. Nonsense. We have no collective will in this country to make sure such a day never happens again. In fact, if anything, we are headed for a day when 20 percent of the people in a movie theater are armed themselves, and we have a good old shoot ’em up that would’ve made John Ford’s head spin but will make the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre’s heart soar like an eagle.

I accept that guns have been a part of American life since the beginning—the first individual mandate after all, as liberals didn’t mind saying when seeking to defend the health-care law. I can understand (barely, but I can) how a person can love guns as I love guitars, which, if I had the money, I’d collect avidly.

But please. The idea that honest efforts to keep guns out of the hands of potential killers and mentally unstable people poses any rational threat to my friends or America’s hunters and collectors is completely preposterous. This is such a con. Rock-ribbed conservatives usually don’t show a great deal of sympathy for our country’s mentally ill, when the question involves social spending on their behalf; but by God try to deny them to right to bear arms, and watch how quickly and feverishly the right wing rallies to their side, linking arms as if the famous “slippery slope” would lead inevitably from the mentally ill to law-abiding citizens. (Technically, the mentally disturbed can’t buy guns, but as a practical matter, existing proscriptions are easily circumvented, as we learned with Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona).

It is of course LaPierre’s National Rifle Association that has hyped this slippery slope and made it so omnipresent in the minds of its members. Give him credit: Twenty or so years ago, the NRA was losing ground. At the time, when some nut shot up a post office or a McDonald’s, we actually had the conversations about gun laws we no longer bother with, and laws were passed like the 1994 assault weapons ban. Then the NRA got to work on three fronts. First, no accommodation or compromise. Second, it built an enviable track record of defeating incumbents who opposed it. And third, it developed an expert vocabulary for stoking gun-owners’ anxieties about liberals’ desire to take their guns, as we’ve seen recently in the Fast and Furious “controversy,” which gained traction on the right pretty much entirely because the NRA persuaded its partisans that the whole program was a stalking horse for a dark conspiracy to rid America of firearms.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/21/after-aurora-michael-tomasky-on-the-country-the-nra-wants-to-see.html

[GarroHorus]

1. No amount of regulations would have stopped James Holmes, he'd still have been able to buy the guns

He'd also have been able to do it 100% legally.

Short of banning guns, you will NEVER stop it. NEVER.

And you will NEVER be able to ban guns when gun ownership is an enumerated right under the constitution.

[Kingofalldems]

9. Wow. Now you have resorted to screaming.

[Skittles]

2. plenty of so-called Democrats fall for NRA propaganda

they are here on DU daily, pimping for guns

[LonePirate]

3. I blame the right for their lack of support for quality health care and a well-regulated militia.

[pipoman]

4. The answer is so simple and so progressive

it is shocking how many ignore it..

Mental health services in this country are not available until after someone commits a criminal act. Health care is broken and the results of this are far reaching.

[Speck Tater]

6. One thing I know for sure...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=992663

[Speck Tater]

5. The human condition these days is...

long periods of apathy punctuated by brief, 10-minute episodes of outrage, followed immediately by a return to apathy. Nothing will get done because so few people even give a damn.

[napkinz]

7. I keep thinking of a line from a Lennon song

"I tell them there are no problems, only solutions."

Now is that just a "cool-sounding" line from a song, or does it really mean something?

[Marrah_G]

8. I think most people want to stop these things

I think they have differing opinion as to how to go about that.