Crazy About Guns

Charles Blow in today's New York Times talks about the paranoia and extremism on the far right revolving around guns:

That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.

And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be — a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.

These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.

These people, a vocal minority, have extreme fears — gun confiscation, widespread civil instability, a tyrannical government — from which they are preparing to defend themselves with arsenals of weapons and stockpiles of ammunition.

The explosive growth of the various "patriot" groups and the mercenary interests of the gun manufacturers' lobby -- the National Rifle Rampage Association -- have made it difficult to have a rational discussion, much less policies, on gun control in this country. But that only means the pushback needs to be that much stronger and sustained. To get an historical perspective on how the N.R.A. evolved from a sportsman's advocacy group to the cancerous growth that it is today, read this extensive article in today's Kaplan Daily.