NRA’s enemies list should make NRA the #1 enemy of the American public

Here’s an example of the mentality of some members in this group of gun nuts.  A National Rifle Assn. (NRA) member wears a shirt with the words, “If you know how many guns you own…you don’t own enough,” printed on the back.  It is the typical thinking prevalent of a minority in this organization of gun worshippers led by head fanatic, Wayne LaPierre.  It is also the kind of thinking that has dumped 300 million firearms on American streets making it the most gun-loving culture in all similar developed countries.  It’s an absurdity that is killing U.S. citizens.

Wacky Wayne LaPierre

 In its own covert way, the NRA has worked furiously over the years to poison the minds of the American people, and intimidate a cowardly Congress into thinking like wacky Wayne LaPierre wants them to.  You see, this misfit can’t hold on to his million-dollar annual salary unless he continues to sell more and more guns to increase the profits of his primary sponsors, the gun manufacturers.  If you doubt this there were 10.8 million guns sold in the U.S. in 2011, and there have already been 2.5 million FBI NICS background checks in January of 2013.

And in one of their most blatant lunacies, the NRA has come up with an “NRA Enemies List,” consisting of 500 names that gun owners are supposed to hate.  People like George Clooney, C. Everett Koop and the American Medical Assn.  Others include AARP, American Bar Assn., Children’s Defense Fund, U.S. League of Women Voters, the Episcopal and Methodist Churches, the U.S. Catholic Conference and the YMCA.  Any individual looking at this list without concluding the NRA is a gang of wackos is simply not from this planet.

John Avlon on CNN compares the list to Richard Nixon’s own list of adversaries, and laments that the NRA has, with this kind of action, sealed itself inside a bubble that completely divorces the group from American society.  It occurs to me that this is the only way Wayne LaPierre and his gang of gun bubbas can survive with all the killings of innocent lives the organization is responsible for.  Avlon deems the move, “…just the latest example of seriously bad judgment inside this once proud organization.  Judgment, of course, led by wacky Wayne.

86-year-old Singer Tony Bennett recently said, “I still haven’t gotten over Connecticut.  I’d like the assault weapons to go to war, not in our own country.  And I’d like assault weapons eliminated.  Thank you.”  Other celebrities on the NRA’s list include, Sandy Duncan, Marilu Henner, Ed Asner, Hal Linden, Bruce Springsteen, Albert Brooks, Jack Nicholson, Jerry Seinfeld and Oprah Winfrey.  Not a shabby bunch and I wonder how long it would take for a stream of public service TV spots from these folks to put the NRA on the run?

YOUNG TURKS COMPARE NRA TO SERIAL KILLERS:

Avlon quotes lyrics by U2: "Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you."  He adds, “The NRA, like too much of the conservative movement, has chosen its enemies indiscriminately and seems defined in opposition to most of modern America.”  Then explain to me how this pack of extremists not only survive but are able to dupe an American public and control a clueless Congress.  To heap more coals on the fire, LaPierre came out with the recent TV ad calling Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for using Secret Service to protect his children.

Hallmark Greeting Cards is on the NRA’s list of enemies.  Since this company is already being cited for lending their corporate support to gun control initiatives or taking a position supporting gun control, I would like to recommend that they come out with a special line of greeting cards to commemorate mass shooting incidents including Columbine, VA Tech, Tucson, the Sikh Temple, Aurora and Sandy Hook Elementary School.  The idea would be to share these memories with relatives and friends to keep gun control a public issue.

If Hallmark were willing, a small portion of the proceeds could go in the campaign to fight gun violence.  And I am aware the mass mayhem is only a small portion of the total problem of gun violence but it is the most visible in the public.  Anything to get the total point across.

Did God order the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre?

If not, at least “former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a religious conservative, suggested that because we are keeping God out of schools, the Deity chose not to stop the slaughter of these young innocents.”  Does that mean God wanted it to happen, since He did nothing to stop it?  Does it really mean that God took it upon Himself as the deity of the Christian faith to pave the way for Adam Lanza to slaughter 20 little children ages 6 and 7?  Does it mean that there is no hope in prayer and common sense to stop this in the future? 

Fundamentally, are we to believe that there is some connection between the violence in the world and a God that takes retribution for the misgivings of the human race?

Lawrence M. Krauss is director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and he has a book, "A Universe from Nothing," that was published in January.  Krauss once debated Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the self-proclaimed spiritual guide to Michael Jackson.  Boteach doesn’t believe in evolution and on television was found, “…offering admonition to those who, with very good reason, may question a God who could willingly allow the slaughter of children.”  But in fact is this a good time to question your faith and deities? Krauss asks on CNN.

He wonders why it is that everyone expects, and the media promulgates, such a narrow version on grieving for the 20 children who God, in His infinite wisdom, decided to call home in a gun slaughter by a maniac.  I ask, is this just another step in the process of evolution in a country that worships guns more than human life and is escalating in this mode of violence much faster than any other developed nation?  It does not make any sense to Krauss that an intelligent God could just “rationally” act in such a way and still be worth praying to.  I agree.

And the author addresses one of my favorite issues.  Why do we need more than common humanity to bring ourselves together, whether it is helping another in a time of need or grieving, as in Sandy Hook and all the other needless gun murders that go on daily in America?  Contrary to some religious beliefs that the ability to love and forgive cannot be expressed fully without Christian faith, Krauss says, aside from being nonsense, “We can feel real connections, whether we are parents, or neighbors of families, or simply caring men and women.    

Wikipedia defines humanity as “a set of strengths focused on ‘tending and befriending others.’ The three strengths associated with humanity are love, kindness, and social intelligence. Humanity differs from justice in that there is a level of altruism towards individuals included in humanity more so than the fairness found in justice.”  Confucius defined humanity, or jen, as a “love of people” stating “if you want to make a stand, help others make a stand.”  And in no way am I trying to oversimplify the grief of the parents of Sandy Hook and other gun murders.

But it is clearly unfair to limit the grieving process to even Christians, Jews and Muslims.  There are those who do not believe in God, and many these days who are questioning their faith when another of their children, other relatives, friends, or just the man and woman on the street are gunned down by a maniac.  Is it not reasonable to expect this kind of reaction and not make it impossible for these folks to mourn in their own way?  Just as there is no absolutist answer to the 2^nd Amendment, there is also no absolutist approach to believing in a God.

Tying Hitler’s Holocaust to gun control advocated by NRA's Wayne LaPierre since 1994

On Fox News—where else?—Andrew Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst, said on Jan. 10, “If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.”  Anthony Polonsky, a professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis University, questions another comparison of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which about 750 Jews took up arms, killed about 25 Nazis and briefly slowed the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

 

Polonsky admits in a Religious Newsarticle by Lauren Markoe that “this uprising was the largest single Jewish revolt against the Nazis. But the Nazis killed thousands of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and the 50,000 who survived were sent to concentration camps.”  Polonsky added, “The people who participated in it were killed.”  More comparisons by gun rights advocates over the years have used the Russian pogroms from the early 20^th century and also the American slavery movement after the Civil War.

 

Others have joined the chorus of lunatics, one such was John Rocker, former major league pitcher who wrote on WorldNetDaily.com about “the undeniable fact that the Holocaust would never have taken place had the Jewish citizenry of Hitler’s Germany had the right to bear arms and defend themselves with those arms.”  Rocker was also accused of being racist, homophobic, and sexist for comments he made about New York.  And then Jonathan E. Grant railed on about pro-gun control Jews using the Holocaust once again.

Cartoon video of NRA gun nut blasted on Holocaust theory:

 

There were others like Tea Party backed Samuel Wurzelbacher, “Joe the Plumber,” who related, “In 1939 Germany established gun control; from 1939 to 1945 6 million Jews, 7 million others, unable to defend themselves, were exterminated.”  And once again, Wurzelbacher is the same one who proposed in Prescott, AZ, that we should start shooting at the border to prevent illegal immigration.  All loosely connected (LaPierre, Napolitano, Rocker and Wurzelbacher) but each an extremist in his own way, and a threat to sanity.

 

On Piers Morgan Tonight, conspiracy peddler Alex Jones ranted on about how "Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chávez took the guns, and I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms.”  The “Hitler” approach dates back to “when opponents of a Chicago proposal to ban handguns invoked it in the largely Jewish suburb of Skokie by "reminding village residents that the Nazis disarmed the Jews as a preliminary to sending them to the gas chambers.”

 

A new pro-gun group called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership in 1989 began arguing that the 1968 federal gun control bill once favored by the NRA's old guard "was lifted, almost in its entirety, from Nazi legislation."  It wasn’t.  And then in 1994 JPFO founder Aaron Zelman called on the NRA to take a shot at the alleged connection between gun control and the Holocaust.  Zelman made his case which you can read in a Mother Jones article by Gavin Aronsen.  Aronsen isn’t sure Zelman’s plea helped but comments:

“Whether or not the NRA was influenced by his advice, that same year its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, published Guns, Crime, and Freedom, in which he claimed, ‘In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the holocaust,’ leaving citizens ‘defenseless against tyranny and the wanton slaughter of a whole segment of its population.’”  The following year, President George H.W. Bush famously resigned from the NRA after LaPierre attacked federal law enforcement officials as ‘jack-booted government thugs’ who wore ‘Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.’”

Whatever conclusions one might draw from these conspiracy theories, it is clear they all originate within a sick gun culture with Wayne LaPierre and his band of gun worshippers always at the root of the problem.  Unless we get rid of wacky Wayne and his gang of gun nuts, mass shootings will continue, daily shootings will blossom even further with more and more guns on the street, and Americans will be forced to endure the tragedy of gun violence.  How many more little children ages 6 and 7 must be massacred to make this point clear?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says the NRA is insane… many of us agree

As have many other celebrities done, now Paul Krugman, from the field of economics, has pronounced his feelings about the leading U.S. gun lobby, the National Rifle Assn. (NRA).  They are an “insane organization,” he laments, in a situation where the pro-gun rights groups have suddenly been placed on the defensive.  Krugman didn’t say it but I will.  Wacky Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, is the craziest of them all with its President, David Keene, not far behind. 

 

Unfortunately these two gun fanatics are surrounded by a minority of the NRA membership that worships their weapons over human life.  This is no doubt what Krugman refers to when he says, “the craziness of the extreme pro-gun lobby has been revealed, and that has got to move the [gun control] debate and got to move the legislation at least to some degree.”   More alarming is the fact that he thinks the NRA “is pushing the country towards dystopia.”

 

See video where Paul Krugman calls NRA "insane:"

“What strikes me is we've actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people…It's bizarre,” Krugman said, adding that the NRA believes “America cannot manage unless everybody's prepared to shoot intruders and that the idea that we have police forces that provide public safety is somehow totally impractical…”  The man is echoing the sentiments of most gun control advocates who see the NRA for what it is, a self-serving group protecting the profits of themselves and gun manufacturers.

 

Krugman is a liberal, ranked high in the field of economics and is rated as one of the most influential academic thinkers in the U.S.  That places the man way above the limited aptitude of a LaPierre or Keene, particularly their gun nut membership.  So it is no doubt that Krugman’s predictions would not impress them; that is considering they can even understand his logic.  In his book, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” Krugman proposes a “new New Deal” for America.  He takes American conservatism to task.

 

The gun rights movement and LaPierre’s combined interests of protecting his million-dollar salary and gun manufacturers’ billion-dollar profits is rooted in this brand of conservatism that, among other things, used fear to win elections.  Along the same lines, the NRA has constantly instilled fear in its membership to prime them to run out and buy more guns.  This keeps the gun companies happy and lets LaPierre maintain his lavish lifestyle.  This alone should wake up these clueless NRA members.

 

But Krugman is optimistic.  He feels the demographic trends, emphasizing race and culture and the conservative “overreach” of the Bush years, has created “a new center-left political environment and are slowly undermining the conservative movement.”  He wants to concentrate on social and medical programs, playing down national defense.  And Krugman confirms the rise of progressives in a political atmosphere where the term “liberal” was turned into a dirty word by conservatives.

 

Many will not agree, but I personally believe that the NRA, particularly Wayne LaPierre’s “absolutist” type, will soon lose its clout over Congress through those new progressives mentioned earlier going to the polls in 2014 and voting the bums out of office.  It’s hard to say if there will be a central character that breaks the backbone of the gun lobby, or if it will be the combined efforts of the staunch gun control groups.  The fact is that the momentum is on and we must take advantage of it.  Paul Krugman did his part.

Cherokee activist Albert Bender believes that guns are the root of America’s problems

Albert Bender is a journalist and Cherokee activist taking the position that you can blame guns for most problems that face Americans today.  From slavery to Native Americans, it is a gun culture in the U.S. fostered by white Americans that has created the dilemma that we are in.  Bender, as many others are beginning to do, is bringing the crisis with gun violence closer and closer to the health care system, particularly mental health.  Mr. Bender takes aim at what he calls a “monolithic” weapons industry that is “opting for profit over humanity.” 

 

Gun control pieces missing in health care

And now public health experts are saying a gun is like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol.  It is a social disease that needs to be treated, and they liken it to reducing car crashes and deaths years ago with safety measures, product changes and driving laws that improved automobile safety dramatically.  When you compare this with the firearms industry, they have resisted safety changes due to cost and the NRA has prevented any research on gun deaths as well as stopped all gun control legislation in its tracks.  All accomplished through buying off Congress and spreading fear among its membership.

 

Although mass shootings don’t account for most of the gun deaths, they are the most visible in the media, and even more so when the victims are 20 little children ages 6 and 7.  Unfortunately, police reporting of these incidents often lags by more than a year, so we don’t really have the true picture.  This follows suit to the National Rifle Assn. (NRA) efforts that have prevented any reliable research on gun violence for years.  Even the automobile industry was solidly behind the research that brought down car deaths.  In comparison, the gun lobby fights gun violence research with millions of dollars.

 

Here’s another shocker on how the gun lobby has prevented firearms violence research:

 

One source reports, “The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates over 15,000 products in all, but federal law prohibits them from controlling the safety of firearms.  In fact, there is next to no regulation of firearm manufacture, and only the gun manufacturers themselves can issue recalls.  What's more, gun makers, dealers and trade groups are immune from negligence and product liability lawsuits.” 

 

In this public health approach, “One recent study found firearm owners were more likely than those with no firearms at home to binge drink or to drink and drive, and other research has tied alcohol and gun violence. That suggests that people with driving under the influence convictions should be barred from buying a gun,” said  Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.  This group once again quoted the study that says 40% of guns are purchased without a background check.

 

Daniel Webster, a health policy expert and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore says "There's sort of a contagion phenomenon" following a shooting.  I liken this to when the gun bubbas come out of the woodwork screaming 2^nd Amendment rights and rushing out to buy several more guns for a household that already closely resembles a military arsenal.  It is all so ludicrous that one might wonder about the mentality level of a group of fanatics who have to repeatedly re-live the Revolutionary War to justify their worship of guns.

 

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president and CEO of the Task Force for Global Health, an Atlanta-based nonprofit public health organization along with Jay W. Dickey Jr., a former Arkansas congressman, says, “The same evidence-based approach that is saving millions of lives from motor-vehicle crashes, as well as from smoking, cancer and HIV/AIDS, can help reduce the toll of deaths and injuries from gun violence.”  Dickey was once the point-person in Congress for the NRA.  Rosenberg at the time was director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which had conducted firearms research.

 

The CDC has all the data necessary to analyze gun violence and draw several conclusions on how it could be prevented.  But, “The CDC doesn’t analyze gun violence because it can’t use federal money to advocate or promote gun control.”  And that comes to your regular mass shootings and every day gun murders compliments of Wayne LaPierre and his National Rifle Assn. (NRA).  There is no excuse for this negligence but it will continue as long as the American public refuses to react and allow the NRA-controlled Republicans and Democrats to stay in Congress.  Amen!

New surveys confirm Americans want more gun control…even NRA members

The studies keep pouring in on gun control vs. gun rights and they keep saying the same thing.  The American public wants more gun regulations, and this includes members of the National Rifle Assn. (NRA).  The time has come for the gun rights fanatics like Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, to prove these studies bogus or admit defeat and get on with saving people’s lives with reasonable gun control laws.  LaPierre’s “absolutist” hogwash on gun owners’ rights under the 2^nd Amendment is long overdue for an overhaul, and wacky Wayne knows it; except he’s trying to save his cushy million dollar job.

In the most recent poll by Johns Hopkins University, “89 percent of all respondents, and 75 percent of those identified as NRA members, support universal background checks for gun sales.”  Now this would include private sales at gun shows where 40% of U.S. gun sales come from.  Since there were 10,800,000guns sold in 2011 in the U.S., that means that 4,320,000 of those firearms went on the street knowing absolutely nothing about the individual buying them.  He or she just walked in, made the purchase, and walked out the door with a means to kill someone.  That is scary as hell.

 

 

There’s more.  Close to “70 percent of respondents supported bans on military-style semiautomatic weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines,” and “80 percent  backed measures restricting those who could buy guns, such as people with histories of domestic violence or serious juvenile crimes.”  The sampling also checked to find out if there were any differences between gun owners and non-gun owners.  There weren’t, which shows a consistency throughout the U.S. that more gun regulations are needed.

The above becomes even more significant when you consider the fact that a large majority of NRA members are included.  This majority also would prohibit, “people with recent alcohol or drug charges to purchase guns, and 70 percent supported a mandatory minimum of 2 years in prison for selling guns to persons who are not legally allowed to have one.”  The survey also found that Americans want more spending on mental health in relation to gun violence.    

But that’s not all.  A new Gallup poll found that two-thirds of the American public support heavy new restrictions on gun purchases, supporting all nine of President Obama’s key proposals.  They were:

 

• 91% for criminal background checks
• 82% want increased government spending on mental health programs
• 79% are for increased government spending for law enforcement and school officials for armed attacks
• 75% think criminal penalties should be increased for those buying guns for someone who hasn't passed background check
• 70% want the feds  to spend $4 billion to help keep 15,000 police officers on the street
• 69% would like the government to spend $30 million to help schools develop emergency response plans
• 67% want to ban the possession of armor-piercing bullets by anyone other than the military or law enforcement
• 60% would strengthen the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004
• 54% want to limit the sale of ammunition magazines to 10 rounds or less

 

In some additional findings the respondents opted for school security over new gun laws and “Seventy-five per cent favor increasing criminal penalties for so-called 'straw purchasers', people who buy guns for others restricted from having weapons of their own.”  You might recall that it was these straw buyers in Arizona, where gun control almost doesn’t exist, that purchased firearms that ended up in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.  Arizona not only is still passing laws to relax gun control even more, but now the state’s legislature is presenting a bill that would allow Arizona to ignore new federal gun laws.

Finally let me leave you with the fact that there have been 1,280 gun deaths since the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage, as reported by the Huff Post. 

Newtown bereaved father just doesn’t get it

No one can feel the grief that MarkMattioli feels, except the other nineteen families whose children ages 6 and 7 were slaughtered by Adam Lanza in the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting last December.  But the father is way off base when he said, “there are more than enough gun laws on the books.”  Although the proposed legislation by President Obama for universal background checks, including private sales at gun shows, wouldn’t have helped in this instance, it will certainly help identify responsible gun owners in the future.

 

True, Mattioli’s plea for improving the mental health system could have prevented Lanza from having access to the weapons he used; although since they belonged to his mother, that is debatable unless we extend the mental health requirements to forbidding any firearms in a home where there is a known mental health problem.  Wouldn’t that just drive wacky Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Assn. (NRA), right up the wall?  But when you think about it, there is really no other way to keep someone who is mentally incompetent away from guns.

 

Adam Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and according to the National Institute of NeurologicalDisorders and Stroke, “Some individuals with ASD are severely disabled and require very substantial support for basic activities of daily living.  Asperger syndrome is considered by many to be the mildest form of ASD and is synonymous with the most highly functioning individuals with ASD.”  And most experts agree that Asperger’s syndrome doesn’t cause violence.  Since autism, which is what AS is a part of, is not considered a mental illness, is Sandy Hook even a mental health issue?

 

Yes, that's wacky Wayne LaPierre behind the sign

 

Contrary to Mattioli’s  position, a large group of Newtown residents voiced their opinions to Connecticut lawmakers to take state action that would prevent another tragedy like the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.  But other residents were concerned about their 2^nd Amendment rights at about the same time Wayne LaPierre was frothing at the mouth again over the NRA’s “absolutist” rights, which was in response to President Obama reminding the gun fanatics you cannot “mistake absolutism for principle.”  Apparently they just don’t get it either.

 

One Newtown mother said, “there's a national misperception that Newtown residents want to repeal the Second Amendment. Rather, Newtown residents want to protect people's rights while also protecting children and their safety.”  It is this belief by the gun nuts that gun control advocates want to take their guns away that has been instilled in them by LaPierre for years.  Fear works when you are trying to initiate action, like raising more money for the NRA.  I liken it to the selling of cancer insurance by junk mail years ago.  Scare the hell out of them to induce buying the insurance.

 

And then there was this classic statement by Bill Sherlach, whose wife, Mary, the school psychologist, was killed in the carnage:

 

He said he respects the 2^nd Amendment “but it was written in a long-ago era where armaments were different.  I have no idea how long it took to reload and refire a musket," he said. "I do know that the number of shots fired in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in those few short minutes is almost incomprehensible, even in today's modern age." 

 

David Wheeler’s 6-year-old son was killed in the massacre and cited the mental health angle again:

 

"That a person with these problems could live in a home where he had access to among the most powerful firearms available to non-military personnel is unacceptable," he said. "It doesn't matter to whom these weapons were registered. It doesn't matter if they were purchased legally. What matters is that it was far too easy for another mentally unbalanced, suicidal person who had violent obsessions to have easy access to unreasonably powerful weapons."

 

If the Newtown incident is ruled to be mentally incompetent connected, it will certainly be a clear sign that it is necessary to evaluate every home in which firearms are housed.  And that would significantly apply to those having assault-type weapons since this seems to be the weapon of choice for the mass gun murderers.  Once again this raises the need for a national database of firearms owned and with the improvement of identifying the mentally challenged, there could be an instant cross-reference that would identify any potential problem households.

 

To some gun owners and wacky Wayne LaPierre, that is blasphemy toward their sacred toys.  To me it is just common sense.