Showing posts with label NRA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NRA. Show all posts

Thursday, December 03, 2015







Ryan Costello, the GOP congressman from our district in Chester County, PA, looks like one of those farm implement or panty-hose execs used to comic effect in so many episodes of Mad Men. But when he’s not channeling the late 1950s-early ‘60s fashion sense of mainstreet Midwest, he’s an active puppet for the NRA, having received $9,900 thus far from the folks who brought you Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Virginia Tech and literally hundreds of other nightly news horror shows.

Some pols got a lot more – by US electoral standards, Costello’s a cheap example of the world’s oldest profession – and quite a few have gotten less. But he’s what you get when Dems don’t turn out in off-year elections. And he’s precisely the kind of pol who convinces people that government is hopeless, useless and corrupt.

But the biggest con of all here is not all the little congressmen who do the bidding of the gun lobby, but the NRA itself. The idea that the NRA represents gun owners is a total fabrication. It represents gun and ammunition manufacturers. Plenty of polls have shown that NRA members support rational constraints on gun sales and ownership. They don’t benefit from mass murders and the 30,000+ Americans who die by gun violence every year. The only folks who do are the manufacturers. They are the problem. Time to focus on them.