Where’s the NRA on Roseburg?

October 6, 2015

Home » Commentary » Where’s the NRA on Roseburg?

Naturally, when there’s another rapid-fire mass murder in an American public school, I look to the National Rifle Association for comfort and insight, and have been searching the NRA website for several days, since the slaughter of ten students at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, but have yet to locate an article – or even a sentence – about this latest nightmare. Instead, the NRA and its robust president Wayne LaPierre are anxious, before and after mayhem, to proclaim guns are wonderful and everyone should pack one or two and be ready to open fire on the bloodthirsty lunatics in our midst.

In that regard the NRA now offers a new feast of gun articles: “Eat Organic, Go Hunting” is enhanced by a large photo of two beautiful and armed young women, ready to kill. “Defending Our America” warns what life was like on the other side of the Berlin Wall and what it would be here unless we’re armed. “Moms Like Me” features another pretty woman – this must be the Babes With Bazookas issue – who complains that when unarmed women are murdered there’s a lot of publicity, yet gun-wielding moms who deter crime are ignored. “New Jersey’s Web of Injustice” chronicles the woes of a woman who legally tries to transport her firearm out of state and instead, due to the Garden State’s gun-control laws, ends up “one step below a murderer in the eyes of the New Jersey court.” In “Defending Her Flock” Rev. Brenda Stevenson reveals her plan to keep a firearm near her pulpit, but not until her permit for concealed weapons arrives. And, most urgently, the NRA presents “Obama’s Latest Gun Grab” and the story of a noble legislator introducing “a bill to prevent social security recipients from losing their Second Amendment rights.”

How would George Washington and Thomas Jefferson respond if told that citizens of the United States now own more than three hundred million firearms? I think the Founding Fathers would revise the Second Amendment in a way that precludes infinite acquisition of weapons and the purported Constitutional justification thereof.

Look to Australia for inspiration. I stumbled into Breitbart.com and found an article by AWR Hawkins who, unhappily, quoted Vox.com about Australian actions after April 1996 when a young man used a semi-automatic rifle – hardly designed for deer shooting – to kill thirty-five people and wound twenty-eight. Australian leaders declared there were too many weapons in private hands and the new National Firearms Agreement would outright ban automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and all such weapons in private hands would be “voluntarily” confiscated and owners paid fair market rate. (Imagine American politicians doing this.) Australians seem like a hearty and macho group but didn’t revolt while selling twenty percent of their most dangerous guns – six hundred fifty thousand. Subsequently, the murder rate declined and so did suicides involving the newly banned weapons.

AWR Hawkins, this time happily, emphasized that “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide began plummeting in America in the mid-1990s as well. But in America, the decrease in violent crime did not correlate with a gun ban but with a rapid expansion in the number of guns privately owned.” By God, AWR Hawkins and the gun lobby have got me: more guns mean less murder. That’s what Americans have learned from Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown, Charleston, Roseburg and scores of other public massacres.

Time for Las Vegas to establish a line for when we hit a billion firearms.

Note: I may be part of the lunacy since I own a pistol I plan to keep but will gladly sell it to the government if sensible gun laws so direct.

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George Thomas Clark

George Thomas Clark is the author of Hitler Here, a biographical novel published in India and the Czech Republic as well as the United States. His commentaries for GeorgeThomasClark.com are read in more than 50 countries a month.

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