Friday, December 14, 2012

Blood Money From The NRA

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How many children have to be murdered before the cowards in Congress stand up to the NRA and their militia allies? Would Congress act if it had been 1,000 dead people in Connecticut instead of just 28? What about 10,000? Would Congress have the balls to make a move if 20,000 children were murdered. How about if some of the dead were congressional grandchildren?

This year the NRA paid out $16,147,440 in legalistic bribes in federal races through their PAC. Most of the bribes were paid to Republicans, of course, but they spread around a few bucks to certain Democrats as well. On the Senate side, for example, every single recipient of NRA cash was a Republican except one-- Joe Manchin of West Virginia, famous for using guns in his advertising. The NRA was more generous to House Democrats... or House... quasi-Democrats. One friend of mine in Congress, a gun owner and NRA member, told me his bribery application was so partisan and off-the-wall that after he stopped laughing, he just ripped it up and threw it away. These people didn't-- and they all got NRA payoffs:
Jason Altmire (Blue Dog/New Dem-PA)- $2,500 (defeated)
Joe Baca (Blue Dog-CA)- $2,500 (defeated)
John Barrow (Blue Dog/New Dem-GA)- $4,950
Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)- $3,650
Dennis Cardoza (Blue Dog-CA)- $2,500 (retired)
Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)- $4,000 (defeated)
Mark Critz (PA)- $3,500
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- $2,000
 John Dingell (MI)- $5,000
Brian Higgins (New Dem-NY)- $1,000
Kathleen Hochul (New Dem-NY)- $3,000 (defeated)
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)- $4,950 (defeated)
Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)- $2,000
Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)- $3,000 (defeated)
Ben Lujan (NM)- $1,000
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)- $6,950)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC)- $2,000
Mike Michaud (Blue Dog-ME)- $3,000
Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)- $1,000
Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- $2,500
Nick Rahall (WV)- $2,000
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)- $5,000 (retired)
Tim Ryan (OH)- $3,000
Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog/New Dem-OR)- $3,000
Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)- $4,950 (retired)
Tim Walz (MN)- $2,000
238 Republicans (like this one)
The NRA also contributed to other PACs, almost $200,000, much of it to the RNC, the Romney Victory PAC, the NRSC, the Blue Dog PAC and shady leadership PACs run by Boehner, Cantor, Miss McConnell and Patrick McHenry. But that ain't all, folks. The NRA also ran their own campaigns in the congressional races. Of the $9,493,815 they spent, $6,735,955 went into negative ads against Democrats; $2,563,137 in favor of Republicans. They also spent $179,469 to help defeat Richard Lugar in the Indiana primary on behalf of Richard Mourdock. Some of their biggest spends for 2012:
$5,771,433 against Obama
$1,850,526 for Romney
$537,667 for Mourdock
$344,832 against Sherrod Brown
$210,823 against Claire McCaskill
$163,967 against Tammy Baldwin


Am I saying the deaths in Connecticut are the fault of the NRA and the politicians who take their blood money? Of course I am! 87% of kids worldwide killed by guns are American kids.
In America, over one dozen guns are legally sold every minute of every day.

There are almost 300 million privately-owned firearms in this country-- that’s almost enough to arm every man, woman and child-- but while there is a gun in four out of every 10 of American homes, only a small percentage of owners have most of the weapons, with the average collection swelling in recent years to around seven guns per owner.

...The National Rifle Association is quick to associate more guns with less crime, saying that since the early ’90s, when many states relaxed their weapon laws, violent crime has dropped 70 percent.  Despite the rampages on campuses and military bases, as well as the hail of gang bullets in Chicago that has killed over 200 so far this year, the national murder rate is at a 47-year-low.

But on the other side of the argument, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a non-profit organization, points out that Americans still kill each other with guns at a level that is staggering compared to the rest of humanity.

A study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that the gun murder rate in the U.S. is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined.

Among the world’s 23 wealthiest countries, 80 percent of all gun deaths are American deaths and 87 percent of all kids killed by guns are American kids.

But regardless, polls show that public attitudes don’t change, even after a mass slaughter like this. Forty-nine percent say it’s more important to protect gun rights while 45 percent favor tighter gun control.
Today dangerous Republican sociopath Bryan Fischer was tweeting as they were finding more dead children that "When we had prayer in school, we didn't need guns" and hate monger Glenn Beck tweeted "Our society is broken. Our communities are suffering and it is because of the ever expanding lack of self control & personal responsibility... It is not the gun. It is the soul." Our old friend, Lee Rogers, the Democratic surgeon who ran against Buck McKeon this year reacted differently. He sent this letter of resignation to the NRA today"
12-14-12

Re: Resign Membership #190199339

Dear NRA Member Services,

I am a proud gun owner and advocate for the Second Amendment. I grew up in the Midwest as a hunter and currently own guns for self-protection.

  But there comes a time when society has to decide between competing rights. I believe one's right not to be mass-murdered by a gun in a movie theater, a mall, or a school outweighs the right to own an assault weapon or high capacity magazine.

Recent events highlight how some of the rights you fight for are too frequently exercised by deranged individuals that lead to the deaths of numerous adults and defenseless children. I cannot in good conscious be a member of an organization that mechanically argues for the right to purchase guns without background checks or waiting periods, the right to own high capacity magazines, or the right to own automatic assault weapons.

While running for Congress in 2012, I received your candidate questionnaire for endorsement. Even as a staunch supporter of gun ownership for self-protection, hunting, sport shooting, or collecting, I found your questions so outrageous. I was unable to answer "yes" to a single question.

Please accept this notification that I'm resigning my membership to the NRA effective today.

My thoughts are on the families of the victims in the multiple recent tragedies.

With a heavy heart,

Dr. Lee Rogers

Simi Valley, CA


And, yes, now IS the time to talk about gun control-- right now. It should be politicized to the max. Sorry if that offends anyone or if anyone has to reach for some smelling salts. Jerry Nadler (D-NY):
“I am absolutely horrified by news of the cold-blooded shooting of dozens of children in Newtown, Connecticut. Yet another unstable person has gotten access to firearms and committed an unspeakable crime against innocent children. We cannot simply accept this as a routine product of modern American life. If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is. How many more Columbines and Newtowns must we live through? I am challenging President Obama, the Congress, and the American public to act on our outrage and, finally, do something about this.”

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4 Comments:

At 2:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

We can take this a step further:

http://my.firedoglake.com/davidswanson/2012/12/14/a-way-to-stop-the-violence/

 
At 3:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard W. Crews at senor_crews@yahoo.com

There are several issues to be faced.
BNack in the "good old days", the 50's, losers would go crawl in a corner - maybe killing themselves. Now, with all the self-inflated self-importance, these losers want to make strangers share their pain. There is just way too much ego in this country - and it is reflected in that Republican nonesense of the "rugged individual."
This country needs to see more commonality and community. Everything counts. ObamaCare is an encompassing trhing, and Republican fighting words are divisive and builds bad ideas. Little, peripheral, but contributing.
We need to limit gun capacity. Anyone who backs gun ownership as freedom from governmental tyranny is NUTS. Anyone with a career, a mortgage, a sewer, a wife/family can never face up to the government. Once that's realized, then large capacity guns aren't needed for home defense or hunting. So let's open up that argument.

 
At 5:38 PM, Blogger Dennis Jernberg said...

The Firedoglake post linked in the first comment makes a crucial point: our long tradition of random mass murders of civilians by psychos (and I count all acts of right-wing terrorism including the Oklahoma City bombing as a crucial part of it) is directly connected to America's blithely genocidal wars abroad. This more Marxist point should be a no-brainer: it's also intimately connected to the oligarchy's class jihad against ordinary Americans.

America's a democracy, you say? Hardly! The Constitution was deliberately designed to prevent democracy. Its author, slave-owning feudal aristocrat James Madison, explained his motive in detail in Federalist #10: "democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

How ironic that we see the same chaos breaking down Madison's oligarchic republic that he feared from a democracy, and that a large democracy turns out to be far more stable in practice than the oligarchic republic he and his fellow aristocrats stuck us with.

And carefully note that support for the fundamentalist interpretation of the Second Amendment (one of Thomas Jefferson's additions in the Bill of Rights) varies between, say, the big cities of the Northeast and the violent wilds of Texas and Arizona.

And this is all connected.

 
At 1:35 PM, Anonymous Bill Aldridge said...

Resign from the NRA and join and help create responsible gun owner organization that will compete with the NRA. Look at the National Responsible Gun Owners Association www.nrgoa.org

 

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