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posted by on Thursday May 04 2017, @10:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the QfvLcozLwtE dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.

My childhood in India was steeped in ahimsa, the tenet of nonviolence toward all living things.

The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.

I grew up not knowing a single gun owner, and even today India has one of the strictest gun laws on the planet. Few Indians buy and keep firearms at home, and gun violence is nowhere near the problem it is in the United States. An American is 12 times more likely than an Indian to be killed by a firearm, according to a recent study.

It's no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America's "love affair" with guns.

I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans' defense of gun rights.

I admit I do not fully understand it myself, despite having become an American citizen nearly a decade ago. So when I learn the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention here in Atlanta, right next to the CNN Center, I decide to go and find out more.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/world/indian-immigrant-nra-convention/index.html


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:21PM (4 children)

    There would be if fucktard progressives were constantly trying to take them away.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:09AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:09AM (#504601)

    I like your style, its very circular!

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @01:54AM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 05 2017, @01:54AM (#504640) Journal
      It's also true. I discussed this history a little in my journal [soylentnews.org] a while back. The NRA started its lobbying efforts in 1934 which not coincidentally was the year of the first federal level firearm restrictions in US history under the FDR administration. Then in 1977, the NRA was "taken over" by "libertarians" following (not coincidentally, of course) an extremely aggressive Washington, DC regulation banning most handgun ownership in the city. Every time regulations on firearm ownership were escalated, this resulted in a substantial change in the behavior of the NRA.

      Thus, a supposedly circular argument turns out to not be circular. We have established cause and effect between key changes in NRA strategy and lobbying behavior with the biggest regulatory restrictions of gun ownership in US history.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:29AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:29AM (#504698)

        > following (not coincidentally, of course) an extremely aggressive Washington, DC regulation

        Yes, coincidentally. There had been plenty of aggressive firearms regulations before that with the support of the NRA.
        You practically spelled it out when you said the NRA had been lobbying for 40 years. All of the lobbying was pro-gun control.
        You just made the case for why his, and apparently your, logic is circular.

        • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @07:02AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 05 2017, @07:02AM (#504715) Journal

          Yes, coincidentally. There had been plenty of aggressive firearms regulations before that with the support of the NRA. You practically spelled it out when you said the NRA had been lobbying for 40 years. All of the lobbying was pro-gun control.

          That is incorrect. You don't see laws near as aggressive [thoughtco.com] as Washington DC's in 1976 until you get to the "black codes" [wikipedia.org] which were put into force in 1865 (and prohibited blacks from owning weapons) and subsequently repealed by the 14th Amendment and several laws passed in 1866 or so.

          The groundbreaking aspect of the law can be seen in DC v. Heller. It took that long to get a court case on the DC law to the Supreme Court.

          Second, the NRA didn't lobby for gun control prior to 1977. They lobbied for gun ownership and publicly supported the existing propaganda for gun control legislation in the 1930s. Gun control was going to happen no matter what the NRA did in the 1930s due to a combination of brazen crime involving automatic weapons and similar gear, and the most politically powerful president who has ever sat in the office, Franklin D. Roosevelt. By supporting FDR's bills, they got a better deal for gun owners.

          Meanwhile, today, we're looking at much more restrictive laws than were passed prior to 1976 (outside of the black codes laws) and with much more staying power.

          You just made the case for why his, and apparently your, logic is circular.

          You do realize what circular logic is, right?

          If that were actually true, it would mean that 5 million person movements are typically controlled in the sense of gun control. So if there were 5 million hammer enthusiasts, then there would be hammer control laws. In practice, there are far more than 5 million such people (they might not collect dozens of hammers, but there's a vast number of people who use hammers every day), and these hammer control laws just don't exist.