What do you call an organization that exploits fear to achieve political ends, whose motivations are entirely self-serving and ruthless, whose objectives are socially destructive, and which has been directly responsible for orders of magnitude more violence and death in the United States than anything that has ever come out of the Middle East?
By the measure of its effects rather than the details of its methods, the NRA should qualify as a terrorist organization. Sure most of its members sincerely believe in the righteousness of what they’re doing. So do most of the members of ISIS. The NRA even has its own Qu’ran, and it’s very short. It consists entirely of a special interpretation of the second half of the Second Amendment, an ignorant dismissal of the first half, and absolutely nothing else. It is dismissive of all data that counters this sacred article of faith, all academic studies, all comparisons with the civilized world. Their delusional world is so far removed from any semblance of sane reality that we had a poster inform us in another thread that this upcoming election was all about guns, and that guns are all that matters.
That is all. I no longer have the patience to dwell on this idiocy.
So, if I’m reading this thread right: He suggested a gun in a locked safe in the children’s bedroom, and other guns hidden and concealed, but not secured, elsewhere around the house?
Are these children to be kept imprisoned in their bedroom 24/7 when not at school? Don’t most children get to use the rest of their houses too?
There’s no hiding anything from children. They will get into everything and find anything you try to hide. There’s no stopping that.
As noted, Rob Pincus is not “the N.R.A.” but someone who spoke at a seminar occurring during an N.R.A. meeting.
And again, he was talking about placing gun safes (which are by definition locked storage) in children’s rooms.
Not a smart proposal from either a practical, safety or political standpoint in my view. Maybe the next great idea is to lock up all the family’s medical supplies in a cabinet in the kiddies’ room (in case there’s a pediatric medical situation in the middle of the night and you want to have the aspirin and epi-pens over there to, uh, save time).
PETA?
Anyway, thanks to wolfpup for injecting a note of lunacy into the thread that exceeds anything Der Trihs could have contributed. Way to go!
The NRA is the lobbying arm of the gun industry. Of course it wants more guns to be sold. And more gun safes. And more gun accessories.
Anything which gets them there is, definitionally, a good thing, according to them.
Really, they’re sitting in the catbird seat. They’ve turned their business into an article of faith among a non-trivial portion of the American electorate. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? Pish-posh. That doesn’t go near far enough. The true litany runs thus: “What’s good for the NRA and the gun industry as a whole is good for the only way of life worth living, and anyone who infringes on our profits is actively attempting to enslave you and destroy everything you hold dear. Any government which attempts to check our profitability is definitionally illegitimate.”
I know it. I’ve lived it. The NRA makes Big Oil look timorous and demure when it comes to advocating for the profitability of its industry.
As noted in the OP, the instructor, “added that hidden, instead of locked or secured, is a perfectly appropriate way to secure a gun,” in a home with kids. He also talked about putting a gun safe in the kid’s room, as well as hiding other guns throughout the house. This strikes me as piss-poor risk assessment, given the rarity of the home invasion scenario.
Pincus may not be an NRA rep, but he isn’t a nobody. From his website, he owns a company that teaches self defense and, “has written articles in a variety of magazines and published three books, appeared as a guest instructor on television programs including The Best Defense, hosts S.W.A.T. Magazine TV and is the developer of the Personal Firearms Defense Video Series.”
As noted in other threads, most of the NRA’s revenue comes from gun enthusiasts, not the gun industry. That said, their publications do give fawning reviews of various firearms and they are propped by a lot of industry advertising. Those on top of the NRA make over $1 million per year, which is very high for a non-profit organization.
I used to post on a board that had a small but extremely vocal subgroup of people who (among other things) homeschooled their children so authorities would not find out about their massive home arsenals. It made me wonder if all the lessons were in the context of guns, or that the kids learned about guns and not much else.
One can rely on the noted incuriosity of small children along with their natural dutiful obedience to prevent tragedies.
And if not, little Joey can come out dual-wielding when he hears bad guys in the corridor, saving Daddy’s having to rush there.
My kids aren’t. It wouldn’t occur to them. Despite getting “That’s the first thing I, as a kid, would do,” from both sides. I don’t get it, unless they are changelings.
As I said, I’ve long concluded that it’s pointless trying to discuss guns with many Americans, particularly right-wing gun nuts, but what I find very peculiar here is the alleged respect for science and its findings that you constantly proclaim in other topics, but apparently not when you choose to disagree with it.
Study after study has shown that guns in the home are inextricably linked to higher risks of both suicide and homicide to everyone in the home and to the community at large. This is one of many, and CBS did a sort of meta-analysis here. The only rebuttals to these quality academic studies come from fraudulent charlatans like John Lott, the perfect analogy to an anti-vaxer. Is that who you want to side with?
So putting guns in a child’s room is really just the icing on the cake of existing gun lunacy, just taking it one step further into the realm of the ridiculous. I recall a CDC study that I don’t have at hand at the moment that looked at child gun fatalities in a number of developed countries, and IIRC the US had more child gun deaths per capita than the next 12 countries combined. The Washington Post recently wrote about similar studies and the NRA’s intransigence on the issue:
Over the past year, new studies and media reports have documented America’s extraordinary number of child-involved shootings. These occur when a child happens upon a gun, or is left alone with one, and ends up shooting themselves or another person. **Such disasters result in hundreds of child fatalities and have made American children nine times more likely to die in gun accidents than children anywhere else in the developed world. **These deaths pose a massive challenge for the NRA. They demonstrate fairly conclusively that guns cannot be both safe and ubiquitous; the inevitable consequence of widespread gun ownership is a never-ending series of tragedies involving children. But, desperate to insist there’s nothing wrong, the NRA has proved itself totally incapable of responding to the problem.
But in fact the NRA is far worse than intransigent, they are criminally reckless with respect to children’s safety. The WaPo article continues: The NRA has waged all-out war against pediatricians and the CDC for recommending gun safety to parents, lobbying hard for laws to prohibit doctors from even discussing firearms risks with families. They’ve also stood staunchly against any effort to require that guns be kept safely stored out of the reach of children. The massive Nashville conference schedule contains endless presentations on the necessity of an armed citizenry, but apparently not a single event on safety or training. There are all kinds of rousing flourishes about “our role as an Armed American Citizen in the future challenges to our nation,” and how one’s weapon must always be at the ready because “danger can lurk around any given corner.” There are even sessions to discuss new strategies for skirting or dismantling the measly remaining gun control laws. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/09/deaths-of-children-are-the-most-devastating-effect-of-our-gun-culture-the-nra-has-no-idea-what-to-say-about-them/
Far from being “a note of lunacy”, what I said about the NRA seems quite accurate. If they and their lobbying activities didn’t exist, and the US had gun laws at least vaguely resembling those in civilized countries, hundreds if not thousands of child deaths would have been prevented and those children would be with us today. It really is criminal recklessness.
The NRA isn’t some cosmic force though. It represents its members. That its members, when polled, have views somewhat milder than the NRA itself isn’t really here nor there. Those members elect a board of directors that consistently takes extremist positions, when they aren’t ducking the underlying issues. (Incidentally, the NRA says: “Store guns so they are not accessible to unauthorized persons”: they pointedly stop short from saying that guns should in most cases be locked up if kids are around.)
As I see it, efforts at gun control in the US are largely pointless unless you can get a buy-in from a substantial fraction of the rationalistic gun enthusiast community. Because any law getting passed in Congress will get watered down to the point where it’s both ineffective and aggravating for gun owners. Which is perfect for the NRA, which likes a jizzed up membership and happy advertisers. The assault weapons ban of the early 1990s was an NRA triumph, as was its repeal.
Rational gun enthusiasts deserve to be represented by an organization that embraces science and technology, as opposed to fearing it. Their families deserve an organization that isn’t afraid of clear-headed risk assessment. Or that can build an ethic where gun enthusiasts who are going through a rough spell, “Tap out”, and store their guns at the range. Such an organization would back scientifically grounded gun safety rules without fear of alienating those of sensitive disposition.
Here’s the thing wolfpup. Gun science isn’t as good as I would hope it could be. Think of the gun as a treatment. Sure, weapons are hazardous. So is prescription medicine. For some people having a gun in the house is a risk enhancer. That’s the case on average. But that doesn’t mean that’s the case for all gun owners.* For some it might be a risk reducer. For still others, a weapon will be a calculated risk: if the net risk is small and manageable, but it provides opportunities for hunting and other recreational activities, owning one might be prudent. Sort of like a swimming pool (which, though familiar, presents a risk of drowning). Or a ladder. Or drain cleaner.
The risk profile that a firearm presents will vary with the characteristics and behaviors of the household. A pro-science gun organization could sponsor a research program, issue advisories and build a set of best practices as well as a code of conduct. All without governmental intervention.
Math! It might not even be the case for most gun owners. It’s possible there is a subset of gun owners facing disproportionately higher risks.
I agree. And the NRA is pretty much the opposite of that. At one time they may have had some semblance to that sort of organization, when they promoted training and safety, but as gun violence and mass shootings gradually entered the public consciousness and prompted calls for stronger gun control, and as other countries enacted gun control measures in stark contrast to the US, leaving it as an outlier among first-world nations, the NRA became more and more a full-fledged and extraordinarily powerful lobbying agency.
That’s a valid assessment on the science side of things, so one might try to argue that statistics about gun hazards are comparable to many controversial propositions in the social sciences. The problem with that conclusion is that in many important instances we’re not talking about relatively small percentage differences in gun fatalities, but many multiples and in some cases orders of magnitude differences. These are not things you can argue away as “soft-science” statistics that don’t reflect causation. Indeed from a Canadian perspective, the US gun problem is so horrific that Canadian statistics are being significantly impacted by cross-border spillover. Strong gun laws in Canada are generally effective, but are significantly undermined when any yokel can pick up a crate of guns in the US, through a proxy or other means, and smuggle them across the border – this is a major source of guns used in crime in Canada.
My second objection is that your “risk factor depends on the individual and on the circumstances” is awfully close to the “law-abiding citizens are not the problem” argument from the NRA. Quite simply, the world is not black and white that way, and a law-abiding citizen one day can become a raging jealous husband or a suddenly-fired, desperate, and irrationally angry person the next.
And I fail to see the point of your last sentence, which seems like avoiding government intervention is a principled objective in and of itself. The principled objective should be effectiveness and results, and to achieve both, in many cases things have to be mandated and enforced, like preventing the mentally ill or those with convictions for violent crimes from owning a gun. This is precisely the purpose of government. Having a private organization doing honest research and supporting best practices and codes of conduct is a great idea, but is completely orthogonal to the need for laws.
Just to be clear, though, the SCOTUS and President Obama take the position that the 2nd amendment secures the right of individuals to own firearms. That is not some fringe view of the NRA. It’s mainstream US jurisprudence, and polls consistently show that is the view of the majority of Americans. It did seem that you were saying otherwise, although I’ll let you clarify if I have misread what you posted.