Thursday, September 14th, 2017
Stephan: The death peddlers of the NRA -- I do not think it is possible to be a moral person and a member of the NRA -- have a new campaign, making it easy to sell silencers to civilians.
That's right putting silencers on hand guns, and long guns. Why of course, that's just what we need. The American gun psychosis eats away at the country's social stability in so many ways.
I recently talked with a friend who holds an endowed chair in political philosophy at a prestigious university in a state which now permits open carry on campus. We had lunch together and he told me that he was speaking about White supremacy to a third year class and, as he spoke he noticed one of his male students, whom he knew from his papers and questions in class to have leanings in the direction of White supremacy playing with something. Then when the boy moved he saw it was a handgun.
He went home, he said to me, and told his wife, and she said, "It's time for you to retire. We've been married for 32 years and I'm not prepared to have you murdered in class by some redneck NRA Trumper." After thinking about it for several days, he decided she was right.
Donald Trump campaigned on the claim that he would be a “law and order” president, and the 2016 Republican platform called for more “gratitude and support” for law enforcement and expressed concern over “the murder rate soaring in our great cities.” (That last part, at least, was pretty much a fabrication.) Despite that high-minded rhetoric, congressional Republicans are pushing forward with a stealth bill that will make life easier for contract killers and make it more dangerous for police to protect themselves from gun violence.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Natural Resources will hear testimony about the innocuously titled “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act” (or SHARE Act), introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican. Buried in the middle of a bunch of provisions regarding hunting and fishing on federal lands, however, is a provision that would roll back parts of an 80-year-old law — passed in response to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929 — that regulates the sale of firearm silencers.
“Silencers distort the sound of a gun, and in the wrong hands, they put […]
Anyone can make a silencer if they choose to…the law does not stop them any more than any other crime is not stopped by a useless law. Gun laws are a joke. 270 million guns in America and 250 million cars…the number of deaths by both guns and cars are similar…in the tens of thousands each year. Should we make cars illegal since they are used as deadly weapons? Electric cars are nearly silent..should we make laws restricting them because they are deadly weapons in which the electric motor could be considered to be a silencer? What a bunch of nonsense.