America And Guns
In July, 2010, Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana , signed into law a measure allowing people to bring guns into places of worship.
There are over 300 million firearms in the United States, harming or killing 100,000 Americans a year, according the the US Bureau of Statistics. The NRA, which was not political from inception in 1871, became so in 1975 when they created a lobbying arm headed by Harlon Carter, a convicted murderer who denied it then came clean with a shrug : "I have nothing to hide" he told the NYT who broke the story. That was June 1981 or shortly after John Hinckley Jr shot President Reagan.
Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and act an act of citizenship (the New Yorker reports) gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principal that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and , in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that the District's 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional.
The majority of Americans A) do not own a firearm; and B) would support most laws regulating their use and overwhelmingly support common-sense measures like preventing criminals from having them. The NRA, run by David Keene, whose son is serving 10-years for, yes, shooting someone in a road-rage, is the most divisive, corrupting force in America.
Exhibit #1: Oikos University, a Christian college in Oakland, where One Goh killed seven students with a .45-calibre semiautomatic pistol on 3 April, 2012. It did not make the front-page of The Times nor does it appear any where near the top of a Google search. Try it.
"One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud', on the American public by the special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
--Former US Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on the post-1970s interpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
