Drawing a Bead on the NRA

Ask an NRA member about mass killings, or going way out on a limb, impending gun control legislation and they'll invariably respond the way you or I do when confronted with a rate hike from our car insurer: but I didn't have any accidents! I didn't get any tickets!

There's a dynamic at work which effects a giant portion of our society: a careless or irresponsible minority can have a profound impact on the rest of us. It's just how it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

Because so many of us find it impossible to drive without texting, the rest of us pay higher insurance premiums based on the rising number of collisions and damage claims that are submitted.

Other examples stretch across the entire spectrum of consumerism.

Because some of us believe that immunizing our children actually harms them, the rest of us cough up more for health care as a result of higher rates of hospitalization and treatment.

Because some of us find it necessary to trash a rental property after the landlord refuses to fetch us mocha double-lattes every morning, the rest of us spring for larger security deposits when we decide to move in.

Because cold medicine contains pseudoephedrine and is easily re-purposed as an ingredient for methamphetamine, the rest of us encounter a raft of speed bumps en route to purchasing the formerly over-the-counter medicine that keeps our nose from running.

And on and on and on it goes. As the enlightened reader of The Square Peg, please say it again: the many pay for the few.

But in an occurrence almost as startling as the repeal of gravity, gun owners remain exempt from this dynamic. They are cloistered in a pretty little bubble because they're, well, special.

Despite the fact that a disturbing proportion of gun owners adhere to the production-for-use aesthetic and fire their guns as often as possible, there is never any blow-back for remaining owners in the manner of increased license fees, scrutiny, etc.

Like gun manufacturers, gun owners exist on a plane completely removed from the rest of us, immune to the rules, consequences and dynamics of our society.

And this is as accidental as sunrise.

The National Rifle Association has labored valiantly to protect all aspects of firearm manufacture, distribution, sale, ownership and use and keep them as consequence-free as fundraising ceilings and finite numbers of lobbyists will allow.

Which, come to think of it, is as it should be. Guns are rarely labeled as organic because they contain preservatives. The kind that ensures that through the purchase of said gun, you will remain a saintly individual for the duration of that ownership.

Because you own a gun, you will forever be immune to the indignities and stresses of life, be it impending homelessness, joblessness, divorce, custody battles or the detritus from a neighbor's tree which maddeningly and inexplicably falls on your side of the property line.

Gun ownership virtually guarantees you won't ever go off half-cocked (so to speak).

This also applies to any and all residents who share the address with the gun.

Your kids will never be tempted to kill you for some perceived social embarrassment you inflicted on them in front of their peers, or for actual social embarrassment in the manner of a week-long grounding or the denial of their cell phone privileges for a weekend.

Ditto your wife when she finds out that instead of looking for a job, you've been having extramarital sex with the twenty-nine year-old divorcee across the street for the past six months while she has been working two jobs to keep things together in the interim.

Kindly ignore statistics which confirm that the gun you keep at home is more likely to be used on you than by you. They're compiled by libtards who, for some unfathomable reason, want to keep you safe.

Let's be perfectly clear: no one should ever exonerate the likes of Adam Lanza or Stephen Paddock for their selfish and gruesome carnage. But taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, we shouldn't be greasing the skids to EZ gun ownership, either.

Which is exactly what the NRA seeks to do.

You are free to disagree or deny, but even in the wake of the recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Congress has before it legislation which will make it easier for gun owners to buy silencers—ostensibly to protect a hunter's hearing.

You can look it up. It's House bill H.R. 367 The Hearing Protection Act of 2017.

(Like you, I wonder if these shitheads have ever tried their hand at stand-up.)

Another seeks to gift gun-owners residing in states with Concealed Carry laws with the ability to take that protection with them—even in states with no provision for Concealed Carry.

You can look that up, too. It's H.R. 38 The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.

(Ironic coming from a Republican-led Congress renown for trumpeting state's rights, don't you think? Can a woman carry her reproductive rights across state lines, too? Oh—didn't think so.)

Saddest of all, there is a piece of legislation which seeks to protect schmucks like you and me. It's H.R. 4168 and is called the Closing the Bump-Stock Loophole Act.

Like its title, it reeks of common sense. Which is likely why in a Congress as obedient to the NRA as a sixteenth-century wife was to her husband, it is estimated to have but a six-percent chance of ever being enacted.

Now we know what the NRA does. We know what the NRA wants to do. And we know what the NRA doesn't want to do. In order to diminish them and shrink their poisonous influence, a new approach is called for.

Here's one idea:

Being that one of the most-powerful aspects of gun ownership is the implied machismo, we start by creating a public-awareness campaign that suggests that owning a gun is something less than the ultimate expression of manliness. We then mandate that guns be cast in pink.

We repeatedly reinforce the idea that only pussies use guns. That real men carry knives and engage in hand-to-hand combat when they get the urge to kill because their favorite cartoon got cancelled or they can't get laid.

That killing people with guns is just too easy. Any peevish, self-pitying slob can squeeze a trigger. The real shining lights of the mass murder community are constantly challenging themselves. Pushing the mass murder envelope. And they embrace the old-school aesthetic of mano a mano struggle.

Cutting-edge killers get blood on themselves. They hear the labored breathing of their victims. They feel the resistance of their cartilage and ligaments. They know when a knife encounters bone, forcing an on-the-spot rethink of strategy. 

None of this nonsense of spraying of automatic gun-fire from the upper stories of a luxury resort hotel!

In all seriousness, we did it with cigarettes. We did it with drunken driving. We can do it with guns.

Providing, of course, that we want to.