No Escaping The Fact: America Is A Gun Nut Nation

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

A struggle has been waged for decades in America, over the “true” meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

With the political parties’ conventions just around the corner, I thought it would be useful to mention of the struggle waged 48 years ago. To this very day — with the possible exception of voting for Barack Obama for president — 1968 marked the year that remains my proudest participation in the political process. It was when I worked on the campaign to get Carl Stokes elected mayor of Cleveland, Ohio.

His youngest son, Cordell Stokes and I stay in touch — and a short while back, when we were discussing gun violence, he emailed me an old news clipping: it showed that his father and several other mayors raised hell at the 1968 Democratic Convention over the need to include gun control in the platform.

Well, folks, every year since 1968, it has been a heavy lift to even enact very modest control gun laws.

What’s so amazing is that mass killings, not to mention individual murders, appear in newspapers all over the country on a regular basis. The most tragic being the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

One would think the sorry buttheads in Congress would have done something immediately after this national disgrace. However, the National Rifle Association was, unbelievably, able to threaten them into inaction on such simple controls as background checks and closing the gun show loopholes.

How ironic is it that the mere mention of the word “terrorist” panics the idiots in Congress into writing laws that limit average citizens’ freedoms, which would violate the 4th Amendment of the Constitution? In America, you are 35 times more likely to be murdered, than to be killed by a terrorist act. Hell, you are more likely to be killed by a deer than a terrorist.

Man, ain’t it funny how something or somebody can be made to be the bogeyman America? The bogeyman then scares citizens into buying guns at such an alarming rate, that there are now more than 357 million guns in America. Oh my!