Friday 13 April 2012

Gun lobbying group plans to spend millions opposing the president’s re-election – promoting gun sales in the process .

The National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobbying group that advocates for stand-your-ground laws such as that invoked in the killing of Trayvon Martin, is preparing to throw its political weight into the presidential race which it is billing as an “all or nothing” fight for freedom against Barack Obama.

Its annual meeting kicks off today with a display of high-powered assault weapons more customarily seen in Afghanistan or Iraq than in downtown St Louis, Missouri. The event, expected to be attended by 70,000 NRA members, has attracted a slew of top Republicans keen to solidify ties with this core conservative following.

Headlining the three-day event will be Mitt Romney, alongside Rick Santorum, fresh from having stepped down from the Republican nomination race, Newt Gingrich, Lt Col Oliver North of “Irangate” fame, and Texas governor Rick Perry.

In the run-up to the event the NRA has been filling its warchests for an election campaign in which it expects to spend up to $30m opposing the president’s re-election. It has launched a nationwide campaign to sway the presidential election called Trigger the Vote.

It has also been ramping up its rhetoric against Obama, who it depicts as anti-freedom and anti-gun rights. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice-president, has been leading the verbal assault with ever more shrill language.

In an article in the NRA’s magazine, America’s 1st Freedom, he writes that “this year’s election could prove the most disastrous in the history of this country”. He warns that Obama is dedicated to dismantling the second amendment – the right to keep and bear arms.

Contrary to LaPierre’s dire forebodings, Obama has barely spoken on the subject of guns since he entered the White House, and gun controls have been rolled back during his term by seminal US supreme court rulings.

LaPierre gets around that inconvenient fact by warning voters that the president is poised to attack gun rights should he win a second term – an echo of what the NRA said ahead of his first election victory in 2008.

“Obama has spent his entire political career engaged in a stealthy assault on your right to keep and bear arms. [If he wins] re-election to the White House, [he] will be immune from elections and free to misuse his ever-increasing power,” LaPierre said.

Other key figures in the NRA have gone even further in their assaults on Obama. Ted Nugent, the ageing rocker who sits on the NRA board, called the president an “anti-American monster in the White House” in comments promoted on the NRA website.

The increasingly hysterical tone of the organisation’s pronouncements is only to be expected in an election year, observers of the NRA say. “For the guys running the NRA, every election has to be Armageddon. This year, it’s ‘Obama is one election away from repealing the second amendment and stealing your guns’ – even though he’s done nothing but expand gun rights,” said Mark Glaze, director of the bipartisan coalition of more than 650 US mayors, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The coalition, led by New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, this week launched a campaign against the NRA’s promotion of stand-your-ground laws in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing.

Glaze sees the NRA’s tactics as part of its economic plan: “You can’t raise $240m a year without a business model based on paranoia and conflict.”

Josh Sugarman, director of the Violence Policy Center, said that the NRA was twisting the reality. “They are taking Obama’s lack of action on the gun issue as proof that his second term will be the complete opposite. By saying that they are hoping to drive their people to vote, and to gen up gun sales.”

In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election victory in November 2008 there was a spike in gun sales following NRA doom-mongering. A similar phenomenon is being witnessed again in the build-up to the November presidential election.

One online ammunition dealer, ammo.net, recently called Obama the “greatest gun salesman in America”.

The gun manufacturer Sturm Ruger announced last month that its sales were at record levels amid the fears of an Obama second term and that it had put new orders on hold while it cleared the backlog.

The election-year spike belies the general trend in gun sales, which is one of gentle decline. Analysts of the gun industry say that fewer Americans are owning weapons today, but those who do own do so in increasing numbers, while the proportion of high-powered and assault rifles is also growing.

That shift towards military-grade weaponry was on display at the NRA convention in St Louis, where manufacturers were proferring guns normally seen on the battlefield. Nemo were among the retailers offering their wares, which include military-grade assault rifles such as the Omen.

The Montana-based company has a mission statement in which it commits itself to developing weapons that will enable special operations forces “to carry out their missions knowing they are armed with the finest primary weopons available in the world”.

Also on display are Glock 9mm hand pistols as used by Jared Lee Loughner in the Tucson mass shooting of US congress member Gabrielle Giffords.

While the NRA is focusing this year on the race for the White House, increasingly its efforts are concentrated at state level where it has found it has the most success in pushing new laws favouring gun makers and owners. It has been an aggressive advocate of the right to carry concealed guns, which has spread across the America, and has fiercely resisted any attempt to regulate assault rifles.

The shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the huge uproar around stand-your-ground laws, particularly among African Americans, that ensued, will be the wild card of the gun debate in this election cycle. “How will the NRA defend these laws that it promoted so heavily?” asked Sugarman. He added that the NRA had remained notably silent on the subject.

Interesting slant on things

AMERICA’S HUNTERS — Pretty

Amazing!

The

world’s largest army… America’s hunters!

I had never thought about

this…

A blogger

added up the deer license sales

in just a

handful of states and

arrived at a striking

conclusion:

There

were over 600,000 hunters

this season

in the state of Wisconsin .

Allow me to restate that number:

Over the last

several months,

Wisconsin’s hunters

became the eighth largest army in

the world.

More

men under arms than in Iran.

More than

These men

deployed to

the woods of a single American state,

Wisconsin,

to hunt with

firearms, and

no one was killed.

That

number pales in comparison to the 750,000

who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and

Michigan’s
700,000 hunters,

all of whom

have now returned home safely.

Toss in a quarter million hunters

in West Virginia

and it literally establishes

the fact

that the

hunters of those four states alone

would

comprise the largest army in the world.

And then add

in the total number of hunters

in the other

46 states.

It’s millions more.

The

point?

America will forever be safe

from foreign

invasion

with that

kind of

home-grown

firepower

.

Hunting…

it’s not just

a way to fill the freezer.

It’s a matter

of

national

security.

***************************************
That’s why all enemies,

foreign and

domestic,

want to see us

disarmed.

Food for thought,

when next we

consider gun control.

Have A Great

Day!
————————————-
Overall it’s true,

so if we

disregard some assumptions

that hunters

don’t possess the same skills as soldiers,

the question

would still remain…

what army of

2 million

would want

to face

30, 40,

50 million armed citizens.

For the sake of our freedom,

don’t

ever allow gun control

or confiscation of

guns.

yes on 4/28/2011

Last Thursday Night  Around  Midnight, A Woman From  Houston, Texas Was Arrested, Jailed,

Now  that’s Gun Control….  

Interesting take and one you don’t hear much. . . . . .

As the Supreme Court hears arguments for and against the Chicago, IL Gun Ban, I offer you another stellar example of a letter written by a Marine who places the proper perspective on what a gun means to a civilized society.

Read this eloquent and profound letter and pay close attention to the last paragraph of the letter…

The Gun is Civilization
by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed.

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation… and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

By Maj. L. Caudill USM C (Ret)

So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed and can only be persuaded, never forced.

Gun History
After reading the following historical facts, read the part about Switzerland twice.

A LITTLE GUN HISTORY
In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control.. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————

Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated

——————————

Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————

Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000
Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and
exterminated
——————————

Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

—————————–
Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century
because of gun control: 56 million.
——————————

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by their own Government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars. The first year results are now in:

List of 7 items:

Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent.

Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent

Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!
In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300
percent. Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the
criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns!

While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in
armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.

There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the ELDERLY. Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort, and expense was expended in successfully ridding Australian society of guns. The Australian experience and the other historical facts above prove it.

You won’t see this data on the US evening news, or hear politicians
disseminating this information.

Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes,
gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens

Take note my fellow Americans, before it’s too late!

The next time someone talks in favor of gun control, please remind them of this history lesson.

With guns, we are ‘citizens.’
Without them, we are ‘subjects’.

During WWII the Japanese decided not to invade America because they knew most Americans were ARMED!

If you value your freedom, please spread this anti-gun control message to all of your friends.

The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in
defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is
supplemental.

SWITZERLAND ISSUES EVERY HOUSEHOLD A GUN!
SWITZERLAND ‘S GOVERNMENT TRAINS EVERY ADULT THEY ISSUE A RIFLE
SWITZERLAND HAS THE LOWEST GUN RELATED CRIME RATE OF ANY CIVILIZED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!
IT’S A NO BRAINER!
DON’T LET OUR GOVERNMENT WASTE MILLIONS OF OUR TAX DOLLARS IN AN EFFORT TO MAKE ALL LAW ABIDING CITIZENS AN EASY TARGET.

I’m a firm believer of the 2nd Amendment!
If you are too, please forward.

Just think how powerful our government is getting!
They think these other countries just didn’t do it right.
Learn from history.

Do you really want gun control?