Dear brother,
You and I have had trouble communicating since you stole my toy at the age of 18 months and our first fight ensued. We simply view the world in different ways, I react emotionally, while you react a bit more logically. I believe I tend to be a bit more optimistic, dreamy and vision board centric, while you are tech-saavy, logic based and gadget-centric. Neither of these outlooks are wrong, they just make us who we are. Colors of different people like your colors and mine are what make our world so interesting, fascinating, inspiring, enlightening and many other "ings" that I can't think of right now.
Today tragedy befell on a place that tragedy should never befall. Too poetic? Some asshole went into an elementary school and opened fire taking 27 souls from this world, 18 of them children. As is expected in this social media world, Twitter and Facebook lit up with opinions of people asking for stricter gun control, using the hashtag #NRA and #guncontrolnow. I was one of them. I posted on Facebook and Twitter, "The NRA may not have DONE this, but they sure
make it a lot easier. Please, we don't NEED a gun that can fire 100
rounds in seconds. 18 children will never breathe again, but at least
you have your automatic weapons." You posted, "There is no sense to be made of this,
Political views or arguments are not going to help the victims and their
families right now." And on Twitter you asked me, "What does the NRA have to do with this?" And our sister replied by posting a video of Kittens, because, well, she has her own colors and way of communicating and we love her for that!
I decided to write this because your question, "What does the NRA have to do with this?" got me thinking, do I really know why I want the NRA to back off? So I went to their website. To be honest with you, I was expecting a mission statement of sorts stating what they are about, but couldn't really find it. So I went to wikipedia, and this is what they say about the NRA.
"The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is an American non-profit 501(c)(4) lobbying group[1][2] that advocates for the protection of the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights,
and the promotion of firearm ownership rights as well as marksmanship,
firearm safety, and the protection of hunting and self-defense in the
United States."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association
All of that is fine, and from their website it looks as though they have firearm safety courses and many other educational and positive aspects of their organization. The beef I have with the NRA lies in "The Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) which is the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association of America" Who doesn't love a good lobbying group? This lobbying arm of the NRA is the exact reason that Political views play into this argument, because the NRA has made this a political argument. They repeatedly make it easier and easier for people to obtain semi-automatic weapons. I understand that there are people in this world who love to hunt and need guns to hunt, that's fine, I personally don't find any joy or pleasure in that hobby, but I don't want to begrudge anyone of their right to hunt. However, I don't think that any hunter goes out with a semi-automatic or an automatic weapon to take out Bambi. In fact in 2004, the NRA opposed the renewal of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban from 1994 which prohibited many features of semi- automatic weapons, they were successful in their opposition and the ban expired.
The bottom line is that these weapons are too easy to come by. James Holmes, the shooter in the movie theater in Colorado bought most of his weapons ONLINE, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the suspect bought
four guns over the past 60 days, and over the Internet bought 3,000
rounds for an assault rifle, 3,000 rounds for Glock handguns and about
300 shotgun rounds. The suspect also had a 100-round drum-style magazine
for the assault rifle that would have allowed him to fire 50 to 60
rounds a minute." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044446430457754103267932...) ON THE INTERNET, with the click of a button, he bought all of that ammunition. It's just too easy to get your hands on.
Things need to change, something has to give. It's been over 10 years since the Columbine tragedy and we're STILL having this conversation. What can we do? How can we fix this? How do we make sure that this stops happening? We have to try something different, can't we try the one thing we haven't yet? Stricter gun control. Psych-evaluations for people who want guns. If we just made the process of obtaining weapons a little bit harder maybe we would see less violence of this sort? We won't know until we try.
I have never liked guns and I probably never will. They freak me out. You often hear, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well, if a gun didn't have the ability to fire bullets at a high rate of speed that tear through bone, skin, human organs, blood vessels, and teeth, sometimes exploding on the inside, or sometimes exiting a body and lodging in a wall, I would say perhaps that argument holds some weight. If a crazed person wants to kill some people chances are they are probably going to kill some people, but its a lot easier to stop a person wielding a knife, a hammer, a handgun, then it is to stop someone who is shooting an assault rifle that shoots 50-60 rounds in a MINUTE. Guns were developed when we needed to hunt for survival, to protect us from war. It's time to evolve beyond needing or allowing the use of guns. A human life has to become more precious than your right to bear arms, or history is doomed to repeat itself over and over again.
Guns shouldn't launch such emotional arguments, people should not be so attached to their guns and their right to shoot things, animal or human, that when 18 innocent children lose their lives they are more concerned with their right to continue shooting instead of the rights that those 18 children will never have again, the right to live, breathe and go to school in a safe environment.
Love,
Your Sister
