Dear Congress: Stop Listening to the NRA and Start Listening to Us

Read Time:3 Minute, 18 Second

So what – you expected something different? If it’s about guns, you vote no, plain and simple, and no thought required beyond thinking about how badly the NRA will punish you for giving a crap about who wins the war with Islamic State and al Qaeda and the rest of them. You’re a Republican, it’s what you do.

Sure, a great many proposals have been misguided, ill-informed and even illegal, but keeping guns from suspected enemies of our country is not just a good idea, it’s essential and as long as there’s due process and an appeal process, the worst it might mean for a prospective firearms purchaser ( or explosives or ammunition ) is a delay. The lives saved may include not only yours and mine, but the miserable ones of the Senators who voted that proposal down on Wednesday. Hardly anyone voted against shutting down the 4th amendment because we are at war, why can’t we do something that does not challenge the second because of the same war?

The sad thing though, is the way we live in our bubbles, not listening to anything outside of them, not crediting unbiased information coming from the outside, as we would as a member of a cult. I listened to VP Biden last night struggling to remember the formula for kinetic energy you learned in high school and getting it wrong, telling us one infuriatingly more time that Assault rifles use “big bore, high caliber bullets” which are far more deadly, when of course they use smaller, less powerful rounds than other rifles, only more of them. It’s part of the definition, but you’ve heard that too many times from me and if you live in some other bubble than I do, you still won’t listen and didn’t believe me those times either. If he’s in your bubble, you don’t question him and anyone knowing more about physics or guns is the devil, not to be believed.

Perhaps you’ll believe me when I opine (once again) that all firearms are very dangerous and the danger derives mostly from the person holding one. That’s why I support the legislation that recognizes the danger of this amorphous, decentralized, but viciously deadly worldwide enemy. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s reality and the vast majority of the people they kill, and torture and oppress are Muslims who hate them too. Background checks are limited in effectiveness, as we’ve seen from Orlando, and someone may be able to pass all kinds of sanity and competence tests, but harbor a plan to attack Western culture and Western lifestyles.

But if you’re in one bubble, belonging to that particular cult, you didn’t even read this so I’m not talking to you. If you’re in the other bubble, you may want to go on believing in the propaganda thereof and concentrate on one tendentiously defined class of weapons and paying no attention to others quite as deadly or even more so, because any information that comes from any expert of any qualification will be ignored without the same tired old Shibboleth: “Assault weapons! are the worst problem!

Will blocking legal gun sales to would be terrorists stop terrorist attacks? No, it’s too easy to have a friend buy one for you like you used to do to buy beer when you were underage, (admit it) but as part of beefing up national security, improving interdepartmental communication, it’s a necessary brick in the wall. Not Trumps imaginary Maginot line, but the real wall we need between us and our real enemies.

But don’t rant and rave and carry signs – keep calm and call your Senators, your Congressmen. Internet petitions aren’t as good as a phone call. If it’s true that nearly 90% of us favor blocking sales to terrorists, making an effort to get rid of high capacity magazines – neither of which are forbidden by the 2nd amendment – they need to listen to the one authority higher than the NRA: you and me.