Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Cracked: Gut the NRA!

I exaggerate.  A little bit:

To hear gun control proponents out, one might think that the best, fastest solution to the mass shootings plaguing our country would be to take a shiny litigatory scalpel and excise the NRA -- with their bottomless lobbying coffers, poisonous conspiracy theories, promotion of violence against protesters, and all-around assholery -- from politics and wider society. It's hard to argue against that. We certainly wouldn't stand for that shit from, say, the dairy industry. But the NRA somehow gets a pass every damn time.

 And then Cracked goes with the old chestnut of:  Oh but the NRA used to be good when it was a hunting and marksmanship program and didn't try to rock the boat by fighting gun bans!

 And followed by a paranoid conspiracy view of the Revolt in Cincinnati.

But this is the biggest part of Cracked's conspiracy:

Enter NRA 2.0. Within years of their rebirth, a slew of law review articles -- written by scholars funded by the ILA -- began to appear that argued that this reading was "incorrect," that the Second Amendment doesn't just guarantee state militias, but everyone the right to buy, stockpile, and use guns. And not just hunting rifles, but also pistols and other firearms crafted specifically to allow human beings to kill human beings without any training or skill.

The fiends!

The support of prominent politicians such as Orrin Hatch and Ronald Reagan soon codified this definition, and as the years wore on, public opinion started to shift accordingly. By 2008, 73 percent of Americans supported the "everyone gets guns" interpretation of the Second Amendment. It was almost inevitable that when the time came, the Supreme Court would agree.

As a result of this ruling, the court refuses to hear any other gun-related cases, apparently considering the matter settled. And that's perhaps the worst thing: By refusing to hear any other cases (and remember that the old interpretation was challenged four times), they're allowing an interpretation of the Second Amendment to exist that, unlike the rest of our constitutional rights, is totally unrestrained. 

What?  Totally unrestrained?
Umm....  then how come there's ANY gun control laws at all?

If that were true then how could several states have assault weapon bans or magazine bans?  How can there be federal regulations on the sale and purchase of new guns?

Heck totally unrestrained implies that machine guns could be bought via mail order with no background check?

Though the delicious part is that Cracked points out how the NRA are suckers for supporting Reagan despite the gun control he signed.   After starting the article screaming about how Trump didn't do anything to ban bump stocks.

Except  Trump did do just that.

No gratitude.  Which is to be expected.

No comments: