Guns in America - My Final Word On The Subject

Here is an excerpt from Dave Eggers piece on the 1990s in the October 2013 issue of Vanity Fair magazine:

"In the United States, a different kind of civil war was raging, though no one acknowledged it as such. For every year of the 1990s, we averaged 31,000 deaths from handguns and semi-automatic weapons. The murder of 12 high-school students in Columbine, Colorado, briefly brought our attention to the madness of our gun culture, but very little was done... Congress cowering as always under the shadow of the N.R.A. - and the blood continued to flow. By the end of the decade, more Americans had died from guns than had been killed during the Yugoslav civil war, the Persian Gulf War, and the Somali civil war combined. We continued to think this was normal, where by most definitions that kind of body count--over 300,000 children, women, and men in 10 years--would signal that a nation was at war, or had lost its mind."

A discussion on this subject of gun violence and the inability to come up with any workable gun control legislation was kicked around on the Bill Maher television show the other evening. The idea was tossed out that every time there is a massacre and talks start up on gun control the membership in the NRA increases. If this is a fact then maybe we should just shut up and ignore it all. Then in time the NRA will dry up and go away. Then when nobody is paying attention something can get done about guns in America. 

This will be my last post for the NRA.