Tuesday, March 26, 2013

The NRA Identifies the Root Cause of America's Gun Violence

You have to hand it to the NRA and their supporters. After a successful campaign to stop research into gun violence, they’ve established, by virtue of their own intuitive genius, that the real problem behind America’s preeminent place in gun homicides is crazy people.

In 1996, Congress, prodded by the gun lobby, effectively halted research on gun violence. The NRA trumpeted their part in stone walling research, stating that, "These junk science studies and others like them are designed to provide ammunition for the gun control lobby by advancing the false notion that legal gun ownership is a danger to the public health instead of an inalienable right”(2011).

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were more than a little chagrined at hearing the NRA’s characterization of their research as “junk science,” but had little choice but to continue work on bioterrorism-related research, food-borne and water-borne diseases, and other “junk science” research conducted by the CDC to protect the American public -- from everything except guns.

America has more homicides by gun than all of the other high-income OECD countries combined. Not to worry though. The NRA has a solution -- more guns.


Friday, March 22, 2013

Guns That Don't Kill People


 It’s truly troubling to read the letters from dismayed NRA supporters. Leave it to “bleeding heart liberals” to exploit the shooting deaths of a couple of dozen children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary (and a few thousand other shooting deaths since then) to promote so-called “sensible” gun control.

We feel for gun owners who’ve accumulated an impressive collection of firearms, only to realize that their guns don’t kill people. How can they be expected to “stand their ground” armed only with non-killing semiautomatics? And when marauding gangs intent on pillage, rape and murder attack them in their homes, these patriots can use their crates of ammunition only as barricades, and their non-people killing guns as blunt instruments.


More vexing still for our “well regulated militia” is the realization that protecting the constitution (or selected parts thereof) is immeasurably more difficult without guns that kill people. For how can they hold back the “jack-booted government thugs” bent on wresting the last vestiges of their freedoms from their cold, dead hands?

Perhaps the NRA’s campaign to stop the study of gun violence was ill-advised. Some additional research might have shown that guns do indeed kill people, even gun owners. Now wouldn’t that be ironic?


Since the Newtown shooting, 2,857 people have been
shot to death in America as of March 21, 2013.

Americans own over 300 million guns, about one
gun for every man, woman, and child in the nation. 
Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam War killed over 58,000 American soldiers; less than the number of civilians killed with guns in the U.S. in an average two-year period.

A Darker Past

  Broadway & 6th, Los Angeles, 1956 Part I. GROWING UP IN LOS ANGELES I was born in Los Angeles in 1938. My dad, and mom, and brother an...