Second Amendment Pimps



The Second Amendment has become a marketing slogan for the gun industry and gun lobby to continue to rake in huge profits by using it as a shield to escape accepting any responsibility for their product’s role in escalating violence in America. This pimping of the Second Amendment to pump up gun sales is perverse and borderline immoral.

Any amount of reflection will reveal the response after almost every mass shooting from gun advocates and the gun lobby to any mention of improved gun controls is a sharp 2nd Amendment knee jerk reference to weakening the Second Amendment. Guns are a unique product in that they are designed to cause great damage to any object it is fired at. The reference often cited for automobile deaths is invalid because cars are designed for transportation and not penetration injury by a projectile. Outside of war, the primary legal uses of guns in civil society are for protection, sport and collection. Criminals have long used guns in commission of crimes such as robbery and unfortunately some conflicts often involve guns with deadly consequences. The one area that guns seem to be used in an increasing manner is mass shootings such as in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado when heavily armed assailants burst onto the scenes with semiautomatic weapons equipped with high capacity ammunition magazines and slaughtered innocent Americans. Any mention of lowering the kill capacity by even limiting ammunition magazine capacity are met with cries of weakening the 2nd Amendment and gun sales increase. This automatic response to avoid the gun industry taking responsibility amounts to a pimping of the 2nd Amendment for profit over pain.

Is asking some to “suffer” by only being able to only fire 10 rounds at their targets instead of 30 or 100 before reloading in the name of giving people that may come under attack a better chance of surviving such a huge hardship? Why hasn’t a firearm manufacturer come out after a mass shooting and announced that they are embarking on at least making their guns more secure from use by someone that takes an owner’s gun without authorization or incorporating technology that makes a gun easier to track if stolen. The gun lobby protects firearm manufacturers and they keep producing the equivalent of 1929 automobiles in the 21st century. Suppose automobile manufacturers operated that way, modern cars would not have airbags, antilock brakes or ignition keys so that anyone could drive you car away by pushing a button. We would not tolerate an automobile that anyone could drive away without needing a key or at least have to break into and hotwire the ignition, yet we have guns that anyone can take and fire at will by flipping a switch or pulling the trigger hard to fire the first round.

The pimping of the Second Amendment for profit is the cause of the laziness of gun manufacturers and all they have to do is put big fins on their old jalopy version products by making it look like the versions sold to the military. Maybe it’s time to face the reality that some in society have placed their love of this product with an attached false measure of freedom, defined as having unregulated access to a dangerous product, over any other public safety concerns. If that is the case they we are headed back to the Wild West where shootouts could break out at any moment as it did on a college campus near Houston, Texas on January 23, 2013 when an argument between two men erupted in gunfire and sent 3 people to the hospital.

Let’s get real and stop allowing an industry to continue to fatten its pockets without making any proactive efforts to improve even the basic safety of its offerings. If it were any other industry it would be shut down for gross negligence.