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| Jim Porter, the NRA's New President |
I hardly ever agree with anything the National Rifle Association says, but the organization has elected a new president, James W. Porter II, an Alabama attorney, and he said that the NRA and its masters and minions are in a “culture war” with the rest of America. I agree with that.
The culture that Porter is defending is one that doesn’t accept the result of the last two presidential elections and sees Barack Obama as a “fake president” intent on imposing a “European socialistic, bureaucratic type of government,” and denying patriotic Americans their constitutional rights. It is a culture that tellingly, doesn’t accept the result of the Civil War, or as Porter calls it, “the War of Northern Aggression.”
Porter is rallying to the defense of a culture that believes the Second Amendment means exactly the same thing today as it did more than two centuries ago when, lacking a standing army, a federal law, the Militia Act of 1792, mandated every eligible man purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. The purpose of the militia was to protect the United States from invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe. Today, the NRA promotes itself as arming its members with “standard military firearms” not to defend our country against foreign aggressors, but to use against our own “tyrannical” government. No wonder they won’t accept any limits on what firearms they can own.
The NRA is well known for its ability to mix myth with faulty logic to argue against any incursion in what they see as the inalienable right any individual American to bear arms of any kind, anytime, anywhere, and ‘stand their ground’ no matter how many Americans are killed every year (about 32,000). It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mass shooting of children at Sandy Hook, or an accidental shooting by one 5-year-old of his 2-year-old sister in Kentucky, the NRA’s response is always the same. This deplorable gun violence is a necessary cost of the right to bear arms unfettered by even the most reasonable gun control measures. Dead kids are collateral damage for the NRA and members of a culture where facts are considered a hindrance to a belief system permeated by paranoia.
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| From a Children's Defense Fund Report |
But it would be a mistake to see the NRA as crazy extremists. They are more than that. The NRA is a shill for a gun industry whose only moral imperative is profit. That’s one of the reasons the NRA opposes the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Despite NRA rhetoric, the treaty doesn’t dictate domestic gun laws and would have no bearing on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But it might effect the $70-billion international arms trade, and American arms dealers, who dominate the market, don’t want to have their dealings with warlords and their child soldiers, and terrorists who turn their US weapons back on Americans, subject to governmental scrutiny.
So I say, yes Mr Porter, we Americans who believe in ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ who want to see our children grow to be productive members of a society of people who care about each other, rather that a society of ‘us against them,’ we Americans are in a war with you and your organization and we intend to win. And we’ll win at the ballot box, without guns, because that’s the American way, Mr. Porter.
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