One of the problems dealing with the sales force of any industry, such as firearms and other political forums, is in how they begin every possession on your twenty yard line. And we allow it, without thinking about it.
There is a hidden protocol in all Second Amendment discussions which upholds private firearms ownership for Freedom, or some other noble symbol authorizing treason and homicide in defense of personal preference, plus the right to kill animals easily from a safe distance. And so any opposition must declare, yes, there’s that, but maybe we should trim back the edges of the monstrous flow of weaponry into our cities and onto our streets.
You can never win an argument based upon reason. You can never convince a member of Congress, say, of a rational approach to what LBJ long ago called "this insane traffic in firearms" because you simply don’t have the funds to amplify your speech sufficiently to be heard. That congressperson has a sinecure based upon votes which are paid for by the highest bidder, and that means they may agree with you in private during the monthly koffee klatsch back in the district, but they won’t do it at work. As our Secretary of State declared earlier this year on the issue of drug cartels and violence on our borders, the administration just is not ready to take on the NRA right now. (Indeed, Bill Clinton himself cited that as a factor in why there won’t be a Democratic loss in Congress in 2010 like that of 1994.)
If crime is to be controlled, we must control the weapons with which so many crimes are committed.
We must end the easy availability of deadly weapons to professional criminals, to delinquent youth, and to the disturbed and deranged.
We must stop the flow of firearms into dangerous hands.
It is not enough to say that gun control is a state responsibility. States with gun control laws now stand helplessly by while those laws are flouted daily by the unchecked sales of guns by mail.
Our Federal responsibility is clear. It is promptly to enact legislation, such as S. 1592, to regulate and control interstate traffic in dangerous firearms.
The front pages of our newspapers make us acutely aware of the human tragedies that flow daily from the unchecked purchase of firearms. Recent Congressional hearings added abundant evidence of the gravity of this problem.
There is no need to curtail the right of citizens to keep arms for such traditional pastimes as hunting and marksmanship. But there is a pressing need to halt blind, unquestioned mail-order sales of guns, and over-the-counter sales to buyers from out of state whose credentials cannot be known.
Only the federal government can give the several states and cities their first real chance to enforce their own gun laws. We must do so without further delay.
There’s a rallying cry for you about defending your own twenty yard line. I hope everyone will jump on the bandwagon – which was looking for passengers 9-Mar-1966, when LBJ delivered the address from which the above was taken to a joint Congress.
You can see another of my voices from another room on this subject right here.
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Just to illustrate, and because I want at least one comment to this notice, a fit beginning to the subject would be: Why private ownership of small arms? Not whether it’s a fact or should be legal, but why. Proceed to tote up the profit and loss from any position. That’s the equivalent of kicking off from the 35.
I’m dry of football metaphors.
BBBBBuuuttt what about all the jobs that will be lost? /s
U.S. -world’s leading supplier of armaments(weapons).
And more recently, the NRA has taken up the cause in Florida to allow more child deaths just to prevent a perceived “back door” route to gun registration.
It’s a fact. Somebody’s ox gets blown apart by an AK-47. Them’s the breaks.
There was a great article some years back in WSJ on Gruman and their switch from aluminum boats to cheap pistols they could sell by the truckload in any inner city. It was a very wise financial move, as there are at any one time a thousand ready to shoot for any single one who wants to float. A free economy!
Oh, yes, I remember well when the exiles from Katrina were seeping back into Nawleans, and the citiy council was attempting to screen firearms from the returnees, and the NRA threatened to sue to stop this fascist attack on the Right to Arm Bears, and the city rolled over, of course, and the NRA was assured they had when their own favorite statistic, homicides, ticked up to former levels in salute of the Second Amendment.
Remember also the NRA was against any tagging of fertilizer which might identify the next Timothy McVeigh. It would have been an intrusion into the privacy of the next mass killer loon.
Timothy McVeigh
I am the NRA!
And in case others missed this:
“British Tourist Shot Dead In Texas Bar”
And the U.S. death toll in Iraq is now 4,294 (not counting,of course Iraqis /s).
Most of the time I was living in that state, there was a law authorizing homicide in case of infidelity. That meant the husband, at his sole discretion, could murder both a spouse he suspected of cheating and her alleged lover with no questions asked. It was insanity, they attempted to fix later on by granting the wife the same privilege.
It’s off the books lately, but a dead indicator regardless.
Clovis,
Arizona is an open carry and concealed carry state.
Very little firearm crime there.
What you have to say?
I say you’re absolutely full of it! Arizona ranks NUMBER FIVE in the Nation in Firearm Deaths per Capita!
Yes, and I think Art is anecdotal, like the demented old colonel who ordered a suicidal charge up Malvern Hill during the Four Days around Richmond. He said, naw, it ain’t dangerous up there at all. I ain’t even been wounded!
If you look at the chart from the KOS link, you see that there is no secret to plain simple logic: if weapons flow freely, then so does death and destruction.