NRA delenda est!

Or so the rallying cry is sounding. Once again before the dust settles, we have calls to do anything about gun violence by people who seem annoyingly immune to actual discussions about how to reduce gun violence.  Over at Mark Shea’s Facebook Page,  Mark demonstrates what I pointed out here.  Gun owners and people who value the 2nd Amendment as a crucial element of our overall rights and liberties are highly suspicious of gun control advocates.

Calling for the destruction of the NRA as well as the gun industry does not sound like someone who wants to solve problems, much less someone who doesn’t want to end gun ownership or gun rights (no gun industry suggests no guns).  It sounds like someone who has decided a particular segment of the population is the problem, and so it’s time for that group to take a hike.

And the NRA?  Bring lawyers in, bring the State in, bring in whatever can destroy the great Satan.  Of course the problems with such thinking are legion, for they are many.  First, it simply supports the objection by gun owners that gun control advocates are less about preventing violence as much as they are about eliminating gun rights altogether.

Second, it’s stupid to hope lawyers or the State can come in a destroy the NRA and then not, down the road, do the same to any other institution deemed evil by the beautiful people. 

Third, the exploitation of death and suffering to ramrod agendas is a morally questionable tactic anyway.  It’s not enough that Christian gun control advocates stood by as individuals mocked prayer and God in their quest to eliminate rights for those we don’t like.  But before we use a shooting to make a point, even while the bodies might still be in the halls where they died, we should make sure we know the facts and that what we are proposing would actually stop the problem.  And that includes destroying the gun industry.  Would that do it?  It remains to be demonstrated.

Fourth, the continued refusal by gun control advocates to engage with actual statistics and facts and figures instead of just plowing in and wanting to curb liberties and rights should make anyone skittish.  After all, a case can be made for regulations or even curbing some of the excesses currently allowed by our approach to the 2nd Amendment. But make the case.  Don’t just act as if it is common knowledge and then proceed with dismantling this or that right or liberty.  

Finally, the above example of Mark’s isn’t really an argument anyway.  It’s just a bumper sticker version of Triumph of the Will; propaganda for the microwave generation and nothing more.  But it’s scarcely less superficial than many arguments by gun control advocates who seem to insist they have the answers, but can’t ever appear to show how their ideas will curb the violence, or not hinder or hurt law abiding gun owners.  Assuming, of course, that not hurting law abiding gun owners is something they are worried about.