It is time to put the NRA beyond the pale.

[billh58]

38. The NRA's influence on our government

is insidious and they need to be shut down. From a news story today:

"When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau's National Tracing Center here -- a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town -- begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm. About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.

In an age when most data is available with a few keystrokes, the ATF is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens."

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_22260092/legislative-handcuffs-limit-atfs-ability-fight-gun-crime

The bulk of the money the NRA used to buy and threaten the politicians who placed these handcuffs on our government did not come from its pitiful 4 million members, but from its corporate sponsors. The NRA, and its Gungeon supporters are just puppets of the gun manufacturers whose business it is to sell guns.