Your Second Amendment Right to Kill Something

A man with two previous restraining orders against him who had been arrested twice for violating them, whose ex-wife (divorced for two years) had sought police protection four times, shoots and kills her at the corner of 57th and Madison in NYC in front of a crowd of people, shoots her fiance, then finally (these guys always get the order wrong) kills himself. The police, in blame-the-victim mode as usual when domestic violence issues are involved, called it "a triangle of romance and jealousy".

And in the same paper, David Brooks is bloviating in one of his patented social science research pieces on how the Democrats can't get a majority together because they're too educated, and look at how the Republicans woo those salt-of-the-earth folks the Dems ignore (read: the ignorant) through such paragons of class-busters as the NRA. Putting aside his argument, which sounds dangerously close to embracing yahooism and the class hatred of knoweldge, Dave is 2 steps behind, as usual, since over at The Hill, the NRA is crowing about Minority Leader Harry Reid's stance against gun control being "the last nail in gun control".)

Yes, we want the NRA to be our bellweather, those radical extremists who never met a reason they liked for withholding a weapon from the hands of any cracker with 2 nickels to put together for the price of a bullet. The NRA, whose fine work over the years has made it possible for people like the killer in the above story to get his hands on a gun in spite of a history of threats, assaults, and arrests. The NRA, who gets behind any 3 strikes law that get a guy life for stealing a video for his kid, but lets violent domestic predators torture and murder their women, and gives them 4 months in jail for the trouble.

The fact is, the powers that be in Washington rely on organizations like the NRA to act as a buffer for them against masses of people who are well-armed and could be potentially dangerous to the status quo if they were allowed to focus on anything other than the phantom possibility of having their weaponry stripped from their cold dead hands, a manipulation that has a long and well-sublimated history in this country since Revolutionary days. (See Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" on this.)

And you know what? Save the outraged letters. My husband has been a hunter for 30 years, we have 2 shotguns and a rifle in the house right now, and I have been on the target range with handguns and rifles any number of times in my life. We need fucking gun control in this country, because we are killing each other and nothing else we have done is working! And until we have it, as far as I'm concerned, the blood from every gun death in this country is on the collective hands of the NRA and all those fine, salt-of-the-earth people who support it. You know who you are. You're even proud of it.

How does it feel to be an accessory to murder?