I’m reading Gary Wills Guns are Moloch post around the same time I’m reading the NRA claiming their membership rose by 8k a day since Sandy Hook.   But then this is the same group of people who endorsed a republican for president who supported the Brady bill while he was a governor, and also assault weapons bans, over a democrat who actually relaxed some gun restrictions while he was president. I wish people would pay attention to these things. If the NRA is a gun lobby it makes no sense some of what they do. But look at them as an operation for getting right wing extremists into office and they make perfect sense.

Anyway…I’m reading these things fly across my computer news pages.   Also that nobody seems to want to toll the funeral bell for Nancy Lanza, who was the first victim of the mass killing, shot four times in the head as she lay in bed. But she was a Moloch worshiper, more guilty than her deranged son, who would have actually looked those kids in the face as he shot them, so she had it coming.

Why this reflex to have a run on guns right after twenty school children are gunned down?   Because people are scared, probably.   The republicans have very successfully painted democrats as tofu totalitarians; on the one hand emasculated weaklings who want to put everyone on welfare, but on the other hand they’re jack booted thugs who will break down your door and confiscate your firearms.   It’s kinda like how because I am a gay man I’m not either a sissified limp-wristed faggot or I’m a dangerous psychopathic sexual predator…I’m both.   Or more specifically, whichever one I need to be to get republicans elected.   But democrats have been cheerfully helping the republicans paint them as relentless opponents of anyone’s right to own a gun, and that’s also a big part of why we can’t talk about this. A lot of people still remember, for example, how Washington D.C. managed to get a gun ban passed, first by passing a gun registry while assuring gun owners that the NRA was blowing smoke about how registration always leads to confiscation…then once the registry was in place, simply declaring that from then on, nobody would be allowed to register their guns.   Neat huh?  

Oh goodness no…we haven’t banned gun ownership…just gun registration. I’m sure a lot of people thought that was very clever, but it, and other clever maneuvers like it, had another effect and you’re seeing it now as the reliable reaction to every horrific act of violence in this country is that people rush out to buy guns. There is no trust.   Whenever anyone starts talking about “sensible gun regulation” in the aftermath of one of these events people hear it as “let’s ban gun ownership” and out to the nearest gun store they go.   Before we can stop having a culture war over guns and start talking about sensible gun regulation there must be trust.

I’m my imaginary world of perfect sanity, I would like to see the democratic party put something like this in their platform…

We acknowledge the right of individual citizens to own firearms for both recreation and self defense. However we insist that more can and must be done to prevent gun violence in our communities, and we call on all responsible gun owners to work together with their communities to develop sound, sensible restrictions on firearm capacity, and gun sales. We believe more can and must be done to keep firearms out of the hands of violent, and dangerous criminals. We believe the sale and ownership of certain kinds of firearms, such as military weapons, can be reasonably banned while not infringing on the second amendment rights of the common man and woman.

Democrats could easily play the same wedge politics the republicans have over the years on this issue, if they want to, if they can just wrap their heads around the idea that not everyone who owns a gun worships Moloch. Ted Nugent is representative of one kind of gun owner they will never reach. But there are others.   Others who are sickened by the likes of Nugent, and would very much like to talk all this over.

With someone who doesn’t think they sacrifice children in their churches on weekends.