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We will stop
referring to ourselves as a "civil rights" organization that defends
"human rights." It is a sacrilege to people actually killed or harmed
by civil and human rights abuses.
We will acknowledge that
our membership of 4 million is dwarfed in both size and sympathy by 6.2 million
teachers, 76.6 million students and 18 million healthcare workers in the US
living with our depraved gun policies.
When will we stop the gun bullies? by Martha Rosenberg
We will stop our Black
Hand, horse-head-in-the-bed bully tactics against lawmakers. Congress has
figured out we are all hat and no horse and lawmakers now fear the gunmen our
policies arm more than us, starting with Jared Loughner who shot Congresswoman
Gabby Giffords.
We will admit we have made background checks a joke. Mass shooters Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois University), Sulejman Talovic (Trolley Square mall), Vincent J. Dortch (Philadelphia Naval Shipyard), Jiverly Voong (Binghamton), Richard Poplawski, (Pittsburgh police killer), Bruce Pardo (Santa Claus killer), Latina Williams (Louisiana Technical College) and Jennifer Sanmarco (Goleta postal facility) sailed through background checks. So did James Holmes who shot 70 in an Aurora movie theater.
We declare that the
"gun show loophole" is actually gigantic and that such private sales
amount to 40 percent of US guns sales. Yes, almost half.
We regret our obstruction of "one firearm a month" laws to stop straw buyers. Thanks to our obstruction, convicted felon William Spengler, who killed his own grandmother, waltzed into a Gander Mountain in Henrietta, NY and chose the murder weapons with which he killed fire fighters on Christmas Eve. A straw buyer was at his side.
We will stop blaming
gun crime on "failure to enforce existing laws" and confess that it
is our lobbying that has blocked sharing and computerizing of national firearm
sales data so crimes cannot be solved. We also block weapon microstamping,
further making sure the "bad guys'" never get caught.
We admit that arming
bad guys through such loose laws and then blaming them for the need for more
firearms is like killing your parents and crying you are an orphan.
We will see the
contradiction in being proud safe gun owners while asking authorities to
protect our identities. We realize our belief that criminals will target homes
because they believe the homes have no firearms or because they
believe the homes do have firearms
sounds paranoid and invalidates our core belief that firearms keep homes safe.
We will stop pretending our fear to go anywhere unarmed is somehow a public service and we are the real law enforcers. None of our George Zimmerman-style, self-proclaimed deputies stopped Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson despite Arizona's many conceal carriers. We'll take a hard look at all the people--including elderly and 80 pound women--who get to work everyday without a firearm and ask ourselves if, maybe, our problem is us.
We will stop
whipping up "preppers" and citizen army extremists into stockpiling
bigger arsenals because jack booted government agents are about to storm their
homes and disarm them. Though we love the melodrama of being
"victims," the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v.
Heller means that will never happen. Never. And if we are
victims, we're the best armed victims in the history of the world.
We will stop our
compulsive firearms talk about clips, magazines and how a semiautomatic weapon
shouldn't be considered an assault weapon. Though the blather is designed to
reveal how ignorant the public is about firearms, even as it tries legislate
them, the truth is we get buzzed just talking about weapons.
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