I Love the NRA...

You know, if the NRA wants to foot the entire bill for putting dudes and dudettes with guns in schools for "safety reasons" in this time of austerity when social programmes are going to be cut I might get on board with it. The NRA as one of the thousand points of light, imagine that.

On a related matter when is the NRA going to start holding press conferences to tell us that North Korea having more weapons, regardless of their type, is good because it makes the Korean peninsula a safer place? NRA plus Kim Jong Un equals world peace. Uber Cool. And always remember dear unreaders, God is a Bullet have mercy on us everyone...

Let's get real for a moment: Unfortunately, many of those on the so-called pro-gun side of the gun issue are, and not surprisingly, intellectually confused if not intellectually challenged. Banning assault weapons is not a blanket ban on guns. It is a ban on certain kinds of guns. Banning magazines that allow one to turn a gun that is not an automatic into a semi-automatic and murder on a scale not possible with a non-automatic gun is not a ban on guns. It is a ban on certain types of magazines or clips. The argument that any of these is a ban on guns is either demagoguery or bad, really bad, logic. It is not rational thinking, something that is not surprising since most modern humans do not think in rational terms. They generally think in ideological terms.

Perhaps their biggest confusion of the pro-gunnies has to do with the Constitution. Taken literally, as I am sure the pro-gun polemicists and apologists do on other constitutional issues, the Constitution allows militias or, broadly interpreted, citizens, to own a musket. Automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, multiple bullet magazines, hell all contemporary guns and rifles, etc., did not exist in the late eighteenth century therefore they do not come under a Constitutional guarantee (assuming the Constitution does not refer ONLY to militias). Right?

And here is the conundrum, a conundrum I doubt if many on the right even recognise. Most contemporary gun owners, I imagine, are constitutional literalists, those who proclaim that the original intent of the founding fathers should be the hermeneutic basis for interpreting the Constitution. The problem is that they aren't, when it comes to the second amendment, interpreting the Constitution literally. Instead they are engaging in a bit of extreme liberal if not radical hermeneutics when they maintain that the second amendment allows Americans to obtain and own any modern gun or rifle. And this makes them interpretive hypocrites. This, of course, is not surprising since hypocrisy, "interpretation" driven by emotional attachments and fetishistation, is the human condition.

Postscript:
I have to add a link to David Simon's prophet like condemnation of the recent irrational vote on gun control in the US Senate and his condemnation of the partisan way elections are run in the US. Check it out.