My Tuesday column and our psychotic gun culture:
Picking up where I left off yesterday, the existence of the Second Amendment offers a patina of nobility, entitlement and providential sacrosanctity to psychotic behavior. The Second Amendment enables the gun culture and legitimizes an otherwise lunatic fringe lobbyist outfit, the NRA.
Due to this misinterpretted and obsolete line in the Bill of Rights, which, in the modern sense, defends the human right to buy a deadly product from a store, too much of our society looks upon gun hobbyists with resigned deference. Congress and the president are satisfied with “gun control” legislation with titles like “Second Amendment Rights Protection Act.” Activists too often concede to the applicability of the Second Amendment when it should be laughed off as a quaint relic of colonial Americana.
Everyone’s afraid to appear too “extreme” when discussing gun control legislation. No one wants to offend the gun people. But extremism never stopped the NRA and the utter wackadoodles and firearm fetishists lurking in plain view — their American flag shirts and ridiculous bumper stickers flaunting their “right” to buy and keep as many guns as they can afford, and to use them in a wide variety of inexcusably psychotic ways.
Over the weekend, the NRA held their annual convention in Houston — coincidentally the same city where, last week, a man walked up to the security area of an airport terminal with the intention of mowing down travelers with his constitutionally-protected AR-15.
Suffice to say, there were dozens of awful and ridiculous things on display at the convention center, but I’d like to discuss what I believe are the three most disgusting things from the event — all of which are baked into our gun culture and enabled by the Second Amendment. [continue reading here]