Gun control is such a taboo subject among my friends and family in Big Horn County it's hard to find the correct language for a rational discussion.
I learned to handle a gun and to hunt almost by the time I could walk to school. We needed to hunt to put food on the table back then. I remember carrying my new .22 single shot to school and hiding it behind coats in the cloakroom so we could hunt on the way home. But the teacher found it, and Dad put a stop to this. He was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and sympathetic, but he also believed in teaching us how to safely and responsibly handle firearms. By the time my two brothers and I graduated from a Benjamin BB gun pump air rifle to a single shot .22, Dad paid the dues for us to join the NRA. As junior members, well before it was required to get a hunting license, we took a county NRA gun safety course for teenagers. The NRA supported government regulation of guns then. From their course I learned responsibility to society and to the American government. That was before it was taken over by gun marketers/politicians.
I remember, as a young teenager, trying to buy ammo at the local hardware store. I was turned down because I wasn't old enough. I also remember helping a neighbor grind off the small nib in the action of his .22 automatic rifle to make it fully automatic. Then we went rabbit hunting, and held the trigger down for a dozen very fast shots—emptying the tubular magazine and scorching the barrel—while tracking the running rabbit with the open sights and ruining the meat with multiple shots. That was great fun until Dad informed us we were violating the law. It was against federal gun regulations to have in possession a fully automatic weapon. He told us the police could come take that gun away. We tried but succeeded only in making the action jamb every time for the second shot. I felt bad about helping ruin that gun.
Things changed rapidly after the assassination of JFK, in 1963. During the following months and years, political assassinations escalated. That's when the NRA changed its focus from supporting hunters and promoting family hunting into political action. Their attempts to remove government regulation of gun ownership have been astonishingly effective. It's amazing when you consider that the American people have maintained their power to regulate automobiles, fireworks, dynamite, and pesticides. All of these can and do become lethal, and can even turn into lethal weapons. Yet, the NRA has succeeded in propagandizing America citizens to accept placing firearms out of reach of the oversight and safety rules of our elected government representatives. Children, criminals and psychopaths can now bypass government regulations via private citizen dealers at gun shows or the internet and purchase firearms making huge profits for gun manufacturers and marketers.
It didn't take long to convince people that any regulation of destructive weaponry was a violation of their Constitutional rights. The NRA became an association of gun marketers and manufacturers, who promoted a lucrative political conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate our guns. Money continues to pour from gun business NRA affiliates to media and political coffers to help support this propaganda. When you follow the money trail, it's easy to see who benefits the most from the last decades of removing more and more government control of guns.
My Dad was troubled by the NRA's change in focus. He didn't want to lose the right to own his double barrel ten-gauge, but also couldn't understand unrestricted access to weapons of mass destruction. I think many of us struggle with this all or nothing interpretation of our Constitution. Guns with huge magazines and capacity for rapid firing, built in the US and sold around the world, are now being designed and marketed to kill and maim human beings en masse. Features making little sense to hunters, but appealing to a criminal mind, such as easy concealment, stealth, silencing technology, and long range sniping ability have become NRA-promoted selling points.
I still have my guns, plus a few more. I continue to laugh at my brother, who claims I am naïve in thinking the United States government has never and will never confiscate my guns. My two brothers bought the propaganda, have become part of the NRA marketing clientele. The many non-hunting weapons proliferated here and around the world, purchased by law-abiding citizens such as my family members, could do massive carnage if the Armageddon predicted by a sector of Christians here and nationwide were to become a real civil war. I question whether those who happen to own the most weapons should have the power to overthrow our elected government. If our government has gone wrong, we have a more effective and legitimate means to overthrow it: the ballot box.
The Bible says we should love our neighbors, but I'd feel better if mine didn't have weapon stockpiles in their backyards or machine guns at the movies. How about you?
Follow the links below, also available on Alternet.org, to significant gun-un-control measures where a majority of citizen NRA members oppose the NRA leadership:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/16/opinion/la-ed-guns16-2009dec16
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/editorials
Gun control's NRA supporters
1. Editorial from LaTimes
A poll finds surprising support among NRA members for some aspects of gun control.
Gun control is one of those culture-wars issues on which liberals and conservatives often don't even seem to be speaking the same language, let alone coming to consensus. Gun owners -- especially the hard-core enthusiasts who belong to the National Rifle Assn. -- are often thought to oppose any restriction on their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Except that, according to a recent poll, they don't.
The gun-control debate is replete with suspect polls and fishy statistical analyses, so when Mayors Against Illegal Guns set out to survey gun owners, it knew it would be accused of putting a liberal slant on the questions. That's why the group, a coalition of 500 mayors started in 2006 by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, hired a conservative pollster to do the job: Frank Luntz, an occasional commentator on the Fox News Channel. Luntz surveyed 401 NRA members and 431 gun owners who don't belong to the group, and came up with some surprising results.
2. Controls on gun purchase and ownership.
If you are put on the U.S. terror watch list you cannot board an airplane. You can, however, still purchase guns and explosives. According to the Government Accountability Office, "From February 2004 through February 2010, 1,228 individuals on the watch list underwent background checks to purchase firearms or explosives; 1,119, or 91 percent, of these transactions were approved."
NRA members understand this even if their leadership stubbornly tries to protect the gun-ownership rights of terrorists (but they're patriots, I tell you!). Eighty-two percent of NRA members think this gap should be closed.
3. Tiahrt Amendments
Named in honor of all-around clod, former Kansas Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt, this is part of the NRA's constant effort to hamper, harass and harangue any government effort to get to the bottom of how guns came to be used in a crime. These amendments, attached to federal spending bills, do their best to severely limit law enforcement's ability to access, use and share data that helps them enforce federal, state and local gun laws.
Not surprisingly, while these are a big hit at NRA HQ and among those members of Congress so graced with their campaign contributions, 69% of their own members have come to the logical conclusion that this is a pretty bad idea, as have 74% of non-NRA gun owners who think there should be no barriers to information-sharing between federal agencies and police when it comes to gun crimes.
4. Reporting Lost and Stolen Guns
Supporting provisions requiring this would seem to be only common sense. But there is not much of that present among the NRA's leadership. For example, the NRA has not only fought all efforts to make reporting lost or stolen guns to the police a requirement, but in Pennsylvania, where scores of cities and townships have picked up the slack by passing these measures themselves, the fine Americans and conservative-lawsuit-abuse haters at the NRA have actually threatened to sue to overturn these laws. Yes, you read that correctly, our friends who love state and local rights when it comes to allowing a kid to stay on their parent's healthcare policy until they are 26, don't feel so much the same way about guns.
NRA members would seem to disagree: 78% of them think this provision would be a good idea, as do 88% of non-NRA gun owners.
5. Sharing Records With National Instant Background Check System (NICS)
The Fix Gun Checks Act, modeled on ideas developed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, was introduced in the wake of the carnage at Tucson by, among others, Senator Chuck Schumer in March 2011. Besides closing the gun-show loophole (see #1), it also sought to fix a huge problem in the current federal background check system--a lax attitude by many states and some federal institutions in sharing records of those ineligible to buy firearms due to criminal record or mental health defects.
For example, Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer at Virginia Tech, had been declared mentally unfit by a judge in Virginia, and Jared Loughner had been rejected by the military for admitted drug use. Both of these men never should have been able to get anywhere near buying a gun legally. But these records were never shared.
The Fix Gun Checks Act would provide both incentives and penalties to states so that all these records are shared in as timely a manner as possible. But NRA leadership has gone to war with this bill, as with all other efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unfit. Yet, a poll of swing-state voters taken around the time the bill was introduced showed overwhelming support for this concept among gun owners. In Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and (most ironically, and sadly) Colorado, more than 82% of gun owners believed states should be fully funded in their efforts to share these records, while 91% supported requiring federal agencies to share information on potentially dangerous persons such as Loughner.
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
graberdb@gmail.com
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