NRA | The Bitchy Pundit

The NRA Is About To Become Your Friend

May 14, 2013 by Bitchy

I’m more surprised than you are, but it’s true that the NRA is inadvertently going to help Americans for a change.

I know that you’re thinking, “how the fuck is this going to happen, Bitchy?” Good question. I’m sure you are all aware that the NRA stopped representing gun owners years ago, and have become the lobbying arm for gun manufacturers. They don’t give a shit about the safety of gun owners any more than they care about the victims of gun crime. They care about one thing; selling a shit ton of guns to whoever has the money to buy them. The NRA has always mounted a strong attack on anything that hurts gun sales, and they always will.

You wanna know what hurts gun sales? Being able to print guns at home from schematics that you illegally downloaded from The Pirate Bay. This is not something the NRA will stand for. Trust me, the NRA is going to do everything they can to shut this down. My prediction is that Cody Wilson (the shitbag who started Defense Distributed), whose mission is to open source gun manufacturing, is about to feel weight of Wayne LaPierre’s boot on his throat.

So stop freaking out over 3D gun printing. In the short term, this problem will be solved by our new ally, the NRA. I think that in the long term, we’ll see a technology solution to this technology problem. There are a myriad of different ways to approach this. The one I can think of right off the bat, is to make make sure that 3D printers don’t work unless they’re connected to the internet. At that point, the giant data collection apparatus the NSA has set up can track every gun that is printed. But there are a ton of different ways to deal with this.

And we may just all end up with a net win from this whole situation. If the NRA does what I think they’re going to do, they’re going to have to expose themselves for what they are; lobbyists for gun manufacturers and gun smugglers. And when people like little Cody Wilson feel the wrath of the NRA, we may see some gun nut on gun nut violence (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course).

Gun Uncontrol

December 16, 2012 by Bitchy

I’ve seen a lot of “debate”about gun control since Friday, and I must say that my usual state of bitchiness has been elevated to level of pure rage. I put debate in quotes because we’re not actually having a debate. Comments I’ve read from pro gun nuts do not constitute serious discussion. The discussions being had are not two sides of a coin, much like the evolution vs creation discussion are not two sides of a coin. One side of that debate is based on science and discovery like archeology and carbon dating, while the other side consists simply of blind faith.

I’ve seen the same dichotomy in discussions about what to do about the gun violence in America. One side (my side) offers several solutions to the mass shooting epidemic in America. solutions like;

More thorough background checks. TSA applicants must fill out a 17 page background check form called the SF – 86 in order to apply. I want gun buyers to go through the same process, including fingerprinting. If you can’t wait a month for your background check to clear, I don’t want you to have a gun.
No more semiautomatic or automatic weapons. There’s no reason on the fucking planet for anyone to be able to fire rapid rounds, other than to kill lots of people quickly. This is not an unreasonable restriction on the second amendment, so shut the fuck up about your constitutional rights. The more you want an automatic weapon, the more evident it is that you shouldn’t have one.
No more clips that hold more than six bullets. If you need more than six bullets before having to reload, you’re either doing something very bad, or you’re an extremely shitty shot. Either way, I don’t want for you to be able to fire more than six shots before reloading.
I want you to attend annual, mandatory training classes if you own a gun. If I have to renew my driver’s license every few years, you should have to demonstrate that you can responsibly handle a firearm every year.
I want you to apply for a permit in order to be able to carry a concealed weapon. I want a record kept of who you are, and which gun you’re carrying. If you’re not planning on doing anything wrong, this shouldn’t be a problem for you.
I don’t want you to have a gun if you have one iota of violent behavior, or mental isstability on your criminal record.

I don’t feel that any of these requirements are unreasonable. I also don’t feel that any of these requirements infringe on your right to own a gun. And guess who agrees with me? The vast majority of NRA members.

So that’s my side. What is the other side saying? Well, they’re mostly mischaracterizing my side with hyperbole about taking away everyone’s guns. The fact of the matter is that no one has talked about taking away everyone’s guns in decades. That’s a fact. And I defy anyone to come up with any evidence of single legislator putting forward any bills to take away people’s guns. I defy anyone to come up with a single example of a political analyst or reporter in any main stream media outlet that has espoused taking away everyone’s guns. That’s just not happening in America. And yet, if you listen to Wayne LaPierre, you would think that there was a widespread movement to everyone’s guns away. There isn’t even a movement to limit the number of guns that a person can own.

To the extent that the pro gun nuts have a solution to the problem, it’s this; arm more people. To be clear, this “solution” is to stop a maniac after they’ve got a gun in their hands and have begun shooting. I’m sorry but if your “solution” doesn’t start before the shooting does, then you don’t give two shits about the victims present or future. You care more about whatever crazy ass John Wayne fantasy than you do about saving lives. And you should go fuck yourself. I’m not going to take you seriously because you’re not serious about solving the problem.

The Hunger Games, Bitchy Style

July 24, 2012 by Bitchy

So I’ve been reading The Hunger Games trilogy (I recommend them), and over the weekend I had an idea inspired by the books.

I think that we should have our own Hunger Games. If you don’t know the central premise of the book, let me fill you in before I impart my Bitchy spin on the idea. In the books, children (they’re called “tributes”)from all across the country are picked to fight in the Hunger Games. The object of the game is to kill all of the other children, lest you be killed. The children are placed in an arena, which is crafted by the puppet masters who control the environment, create genetically modified creatures to aid in the killing, etc.

Here’s my thought on The Hunger Games we should have. I want to create an arena that looks a lot like a dark movie theater. I want to fill that arena with tear gas, and I want to put a heavily armed homicidal maniac in the arena. The tributes in my Hunger Games would be every politician who believes that the Aurora shooting could have been prevented if more people in the theater had guns. While we’re at it, I want additional tributes to be any politician that has ever gotten a passing grade from the NRA.

To be fair, I would allow all of the tributes to have one firearm of their choice, containing a full clip of ammunition. They will not receive gas masks or night vision goggles, since seeing in the dark, through a cloud of tear gas apparently isn’t a problem.

To be extra generous, I won’t make them fight it out to the death. Everyone who is left alive after the homicidal maniac has been killed, gets to leave the theater a victor.

So what do you think? Sound like fun to you?

Your Gun Will Not Make Your Penis Larger

January 13, 2011 by Bitchy

And it won’t help you to stop a shooting in progress.

Trent Franks is the latest to join in on a tired, old, easily disprovable refrain by claiming that what America needs in order to stop gun violence is more guns. He said, “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person, that’s all I have to say”.

Let’s review the facts.

For every ten US citizens there are nine guns, making the US the most heavily armed nation in the world.
40 – 50% of all US households own a firearm.
There were 13,636 murders in America in 2009. 68% of those murders were committed using firearms.

I couldn’t find statistics on how many crimes are stopped annually by armed citizens, but I can tell you that after two hours of searching, I found a whopping six examples over the past two years. That was after combing every whackadodle pro-gun site I could find. They celebrate those six miracles in perpetuity and hold them up as examples of why America needs to be more heavily armed.

I refer to those cases as miracles because they’re so fucking rare, relative to the gun statistics above, that they may as well be immaculate conceptions. And I’m fairly certain that I now have more tangible examples of an armed citizen mitigating a gun crime than any asshat that makes that claim.

I actually found more examples of shootings being stopped by an unarmed civilian, as we saw in the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

In a state where a permit is not required to carry a concealed weapon, a 61 year old unarmed woman went after the shooter. Where were all of the gun toting tough guys? Why do they never seem to be around when you need them? This shooting happened at a fucking Safeway, so you can’t say that the place was exclusively filled with democratic pussies. Where were the John Waynes?

The heroes in this shooting were a 61 year old unarmed woman and a gay Latino. Suck on that, Trent Franks.

It always feels to me like NRA members have batshit crazy opinions about guns in America. Probably because the NRA draws batshit crazy lines in the sand. It turns out that Wayne LaPierre (head of the NRA) is a minority nutjob, representing people that aren’t so nutty.

Frank Luntz was commissioned by Mike Bloomberg to do a poll of NRA members last year. He got some fascinating results.

82% of NRA members and 86% of non-NRA gun owners support prohibiting suspected terrorists from being able to buy guns.
69% of NRA members and 85% of all non-NRA gun owners support background checks at gun shows.

Here’s the one where they lost me, but the numbers aren’t as bad as I would have thought them to be;

58% of all NRA members and 36% of non-NRA gun owners oppose a ban on semi-automatic weapons.

That one is a little nutty since the only use for an automatic or semi-automatic weapon, is to kill a lot of people very quickly. But the good news is that the NRA only has four million members so most gun owners in America are not NRA members and they’re not crazy.

Most Americans are for banning semi-automatic and automatic weapons. If Clinton’s ban were still in place, Loughner would not have been able to walk into Walmart and buy a clip with 33 rounds in it. He would have had to follow Sarah Palin’s advice and reload after firing off 10 shots. Does anyone besides Wayne LaPierre actually think that the ban wouldn’t have saved lives in this situation?

Sadly, I suspect that this will be another situation where most Americans overwhelmingly agree on something, but a lone asshole like Wayne LaPierre will override the will of the American people.

Someone needs to start an organization to represent non-extremist gun owners and non-gun owners alike.