So while the NRA may be a bloated, possibly corrupt, excessively powerful lobbying force, partly staffed by horrible racists, it’s also the mouthpiece of a fandom more widespread than Bronies, Trekkies, and Furries combined and multiplied by a hundred. Gun ownership is almost inarguably the single most popular hobby in America, and the NRA is a consequence of that.
 
Even popular gun-control efforts that failed, like the 2013 bill, would have been nothing more than tiny, symbolic changes, such as making background checks more ubiquitous, or eliminating high-capacity magazines. Elliot Rodger passed his background check and didn’t use high-capacity magazines. The presence of the NRA makes real reform so far-fetched, nothing has even been proposed, let alone voted on, that will get us anywhere close to Richard Martinez’s “Not One More” promised land.
 
And meanwhile, there’s shooting after shooting. When these things happened, the president used to fly out to the grieving town and give a speech. Now we don’t even fly our flags at half mast. They’ve become an ongoing problem we can’t take the time out of our day to be individually upset about, like Adam Sandler movies.
  Matching shooters gun-for-gun isn’t a solution anyone takes seriously, not even the NRA. The real answer is that we, the American people, see that there are school shootings, and we all agree that they’re tragic, but then we’ve done the David Foster Wallace thought experiment in our heads: Gun control would mean an America with fewer school shootings, but we would lose some of our gun freedom.
 
And apparently we don’t want to live in a place like that.

We’ll Always Have School Shootings Because We Really Really Love Guns

Fuck the NRA.

(via wilwheaton)

One gun per household, or one gun per holder of a gun license.  Period. Stop.  It fulfills the Second Amendment and slows down the legal stockpilers. 

This country has a fucking problem.  If gun deaths were cancer people would be screaming for a cure.  If gun injuries were car accidents we would be demanding higher safety standards for cars.  Instead we let the NRA persuade us to let small children shoot one another, teenagers shoot mothers and grandparents and people they don’t even know, spouses shoot one another, and people in bars shoot one another for reasons they can’t remember the next day because the NRA is a “hobby.”  (I don’t disagree with the term; I’m just disgusted.)

When will the fact that people are dead, damaged, and disfigured start to bother Americans long last the start time for Monday night footbal or the season ender of American Idol?  Would it make a difference to them if Kim Kardashian were caught in a drive-by?  Would they rise up and take their excess guns to the cop shop if Pat and Vanna and their set crew were held hostage in the studio?  Would they realize a rifle is a stupid item of bedroom decor if the firstborn child of every household used one to shoot baby sister?

When will the American people stop abdicating responsibility for one another’s lives to canting pundits who are paid to have particular opinions?  No one is going to pay for the funerals of their parents, their children, their uncles.  No one who pays for the people who shout about their right to be fully weaponized will pay for so much as the candles and teddy bears people place in front of houses, schools, and beauty salons.  Americans need to grow up and take responsibility for the dead as well as the living.  They need to look beyond their own driveways, because if they don’t, they might see blood on that concrete one day.

(via tamorapierce)

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