Shooting is Business, and Business is Good

[WilliamPitt]

(Image: Gun barrel via Shutterstock)

Shooting is Business, and Business is Good
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 20 December 2012

Old man lying by the side of the road
with the lorries rolling by,
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load
and the buildings shake the sky,
Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn
and the morning paper flies,
Dead man lying by the side of the road
with the daylight in his eyes...

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around...

- Neil Young

An 11-year old boy in Utah brought a .22 pistol to school with him on Tuesday. His parents apparently gave it to him "for protection" in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. His teacher found out he had it after he put the gun to the head of a classmate at recess and threatened to kill her.

Only two weeks ago, on December 4th, 11 people were shot in one night in Chicago, but that news barely jiggled the wires, because at the time everyone was encompassing the murder-suicide perpetrated by NFL player Jovan Belcher, who shot his girlfriend to death in front of her mother before killing himself in front of his coaches in a parking lot. At the time, everyone said it was terrible, something that really makes you think, and Bob Costas went so far as to lament the deadly nature of America's gun culture during the national broadcast of a football game. He was roundly attacked for speaking out of turn, for "not having all the facts," and for generally intruding upon everyone's enjoyment of the game.

Between 2003 and 2010, 247,131 Americans died of gunshot wounds. Since 1982, there have been more than 60 mass shootings in America. In almost every case, the weapons used were obtained legally. The number of households with guns has been declining, with a few upticks here and there, since 1990, and yet gun sales went through the roof in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, which means more people aren't buying guns, but the people who buy guns are buying more of them.

The gun business in America is booming, despite the decline in households that own guns. As the Washington Post glibly noted this week, "The U.S. gun industry has been one of the brightest spots in the U.S. economy in recent years, even through the recent downturn. This year, it racked up $11.7 billion in sales and $992 million in profits, according to the research firm IBISWorld." Almost 17 million people applied for a background check to purchase a gun in 2012. More than 156 million people have applied since 1998.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13441-shooting-is-business-and-business-is-good

[GeorgeGist]

1. Surprise, surprise ...

[Tippy]

2. A Box of Amunition before the shooting sold for $12.00 a box

Now sells for $50.00 a box in TN...

[WilliamPitt]

3. Up

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. The choke point for regulation is not necessarily the guns or ammo, but the shooting ranges

We can regulate the shooting ranges on anything. Nothing in a the Constitution guarantees a place to go to shoot your guns. We can regulate them like bars; we can do whatever we want with them. We could shut them down even.

Have fun owning 13 guns with no place to shoot them.

[WilliamPitt]

5. "It is enough"

It is enough. We have come to a place of definitions after this last, latest outrage. We are strong enough, and wise enough, and good enough to encompass this horror and bend it into something that serves us as a nation. No greater monument could stand over the graves of the lost than one that reads, "From This, No More."

"The so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement," wrote Hunter S. Thompson almost 50 years ago. "America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws."

It is the guns. And it is this nation's pathetic approach to mental health issues in an age where the basic facts of the times are enough alone to derange people. It is the way we medicate ourselves in an orbit of profit-motives that says more pills are better. It is the way we exist as a nation that has been at permanent war for more than 70 years, the way violence is our calling card, the way we spend trillions on killing while neglecting and ignoring our own. It is our myths, and it is our realities.

But it is the guns.

And we have to start somewhere.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. Brilliantly written, Will.