Obama sets stage for ending gun lobby's con game

[SecularMotion]

WASHINGTON --The apologists for the weapons industry -- they pass themselves off as the gun rights movement -- demonstrate their intellectual bankruptcy by regularly contradicting themselves with a straight face.

On the one hand, President Barack Obama's modest initiatives to keep guns out of the wrong hands are denounced as an outlandish abuse of his executive powers. House Speaker Paul Ryan showed why the Republican far right has such faith in him by declaring that Obama's "words and actions amount to a form of intimidation that undermines liberty." Accusing a president of undermining liberty is a nice way of encouraging those who see him as a dictator.

Yet there was the National Rifle Association itself making fun of Obama's actions for being puny. "This is it, really?" said the NRA's Jennifer Baker. "They're not really doing anything." The same NRA put up a frightening online video declaring that Obama is "our biggest threat to national security." So a president who's "not really doing anything" is also a menacing tyrant.

This is an old trick on the part of those who will not budge, no matter how many Americans are killed by firearms. Their favorite ploy is to say that because there are already so many guns out there -- some estimates run to over 300 million -- no particular practical measure will do much of anything to stem the violence. It's hard to know the exact number, by the way, partly because the NRA and its congressional enablers impede gun research.

http://www.goerie.com/obama-sets-stage-for-ending-gun-lobbys-con-game-ej-dionne