The NRA and foreign gun running

by JerryM | February 13, 2013 at 08:34 am

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I have written before about how the National Rifleman Association, or the NRA, is engaged in character attacks on President Obama. How it has opposed universal background checks while pretending that it isn't doing just that. Well, Jon Stewart put a slapdown on the NRA and its' employees, current and former, another name for them being members of the U.S. Congress.

For example the "ATF is prohibited from creating a federal registry to track gun sales. It also is barred from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor."

It also can't require gun dealers to keep an inventory of their guns, can only check their records once a year (which it only does once every 17 years on average per gun store because of lack of funding) and can't revoke or even suspend gun dealers licenses because of trace data that shows they sell a high number of guns involved in crimes.

The ATF is almost toothless in going after dangerous and violent felons, while the government cracks down on those who smoke marijuana for medical reasons. It's absurd.

Also, we need universal gun registration because we need to know if a gun is used in a crime, who originally bought the gun. It might be a strawbuyer who can legally buy guns, but illegally buys them for those who he/she knows can't. After all, that is how a couple of the guns got in the hands of the Columbine killers.

The NRA has also opposed a treaty to regulate small arms trafficking around the world that has led to millions upon millions of deaths by guns. The AK-47 was invented by post-WWII Soviet Union. An estimated quarter of a million people a year are killed by these specific guns.

It is of course not just Americans killed by unregulated guns, but people throughout the world. In both cases, the NRA has caused thousands to millions of deaths by their opposition to common sense laws and treaties. Urge, politely, for the NRA to stop opposing this treaty, though this link provided by Amnesty International.