Why the NRA is more monstrous than you think

[krispos42]

50. The fear of being the victims of a culture war is what is driving gun sales...

...not so much fear of crime.

It's quite simple. Some people, perhaps you're one of them, seriously dislikes "gun culture" and is vastly uncomfortable with the idea that some people own guns optimized for self-defense. This idea makes you uncomfortable because this means that there are lots and lots of people out there that, as a part of their everyday existence, think about and prepare to kill people. They think about and prepare for this in a methodical way, spending time and money to learn how to do so.

So, you decided that "something has to be done". But what to do? The natural market for guns means that about 40% of the nation is interested in guns and wants to own them. So, then, time to use the bully pulpit and some functionally useless but high-profile gun-control laws to "change the culture".

After the 1993 Assault Weapon Ban became law, it became the greatest driver of sales of semiautomatic rifles, particularly of the AR-15 and AK-47 pattern. Non-assault-weapon versions of AK-47s and AR-15s were created and sold, and as gun owners became more involved in politics and learned more about AR-15s and AK-47s, more and more of them bought them.

Now AR-15s are hugely popular. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even more than a million, are sold a year. Obama became president, and sales skyrocketed because of the Democratic Party's history of wanting to ban certain kinds of guns with certain kinds of accessories to "change the culture".

Democrats are rather gutless on changing our culture in ways that might actually reduce the core reasons of violence and murder. I mean, god fucking forbid we un-privatize prisons, legalize some drugs, get out of those free-trade agreements that have sent our middle class to China and India, break up the corporate monopolies and oligarchies, restore the progressive income tax, and put into place a rational inheritance tax. And universal health insurance would be nice. So would cheap or free college (or trade schools) for people.

Not only will this stuff lower violence (including, ta-da, GUN violence) but it would vastly improve the everyday lives of damn near everybody, and do it from Day One. More small, agile businesses. No more health-related bankruptcies. No more being chained to a job for the health insurance. More people with associates and bachelors degrees. More marketplace competition. Fewer felons, less money spent on prisons and courts and cops, and better democracy.

But the DNC isn't going to take on all those rich lobbies. No siree! So instead they're going to blame hardware, and the features that the hardware has. Yeah, that's really the brave path, isn't it?


There is something fundamentally wrong with our society. Our non-gun homicide rate (about one-third of our total) is as high, about, as other industrialized democratic countries' TOTAL homicide rate. Since it is the height of foolishness to assume that, in the absence of guns, the 2/3rds of murderers annually will simply not kill with alternate means, we can safely assume that even if you achieved a significant reduction in gun-ownership rates we would still have a much higher rate than the countries you want to compare us to.

And your well-intentioned but misguided attempt to "fix" America isn't doing anything but mobilizing gun owners. It's reached the point where merely owning a gun, any kind of gun, is now seen as a political statement. And you keep failing to notice that gun owners get far more involved when non-gun owners try to meddle in their gun safe, than non-gun-owners get. Remember, nobody is trying to force non-gun-owners to own guns, but non-gun-owners are sure as hell trying to make gun owners jump through intrusive legal hoops and piles of paperwork while sharply limiting their options.


And allow me to correct you... the PERCEPTION of VIOLENCE leads to fear, which leads to more preventive measures (of which guns are a component). Our crime rates are at 40 year lows, yet the PERCEPTION of violence is very high, thanks to 24/7 cable news and the various social media providers that can inflate news stories to wildly disproportionate levels while simultaneously inspiring copycats.