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.

More Bodies Fell And More Guns Sell

Twenty 6 and 7 year old children are killed by a madman wielding an assault style semiautomatic rifle and one of the results is an increase in gun sales, gun makers’ stock prices and membership in the NRA. It seems that longer funeral procession lines from mass shootings generate even longer lines to buy more guns. We may have a problem.

Many say that the spike in guns sale and National Rifle Membership was spurred by the prospect of a looming potential ban on certain guns and a weakening of the second amendment, but that is a smokescreen. The real driving forces behind the perverse relationship between the almost cause effect relationship between mass shooting events and gun sales increase are greed, selfishness and opportunism. The 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution has become nothing more than a marketing slogan for those wanting to continue buying their favorite hobby guns and the gun lobby working to keep the sales of guns at a bubble level. The truth is that the current gun sales environment is like the real estate bubble that took the economy down when it burst.




It seems that the gun lobby may have won as more school districts are deciding to arm some teachers and even janitors. A huge new market is opening for gun manufacturers based upon the utterances from the executive vice president of the NRA, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Those words and atmosphere of fear even have senior citizens that have never owned a gun before going to their local gun dealer to purchase a gun for the first time.

Think about the responses that the gun industry have when a mass shooting takes place anywhere in the country. Oh wait, what response have you heard from the manufacturers directly? What if products from other manufacturers were used to kill 20 children, would there not be a response directly from the manufacturers? Consider the NRA response to be the manufacturers’ response, buy more of our product to protect yourself from someone using our product. Isn’t that like someone arming both sides in a war that they are helping to prolong?

I have a gun that I have owned for over 30 years and it still works fine. Sanity is the real fear of the gun industry. We have well over 270 million guns in the United States and there are just fewer than 114 million households in the country. That means there are over 2.3 guns for every household in the country and not every household has a gun. If every household had one gun for protection and kept their gun as long as I have then there would be a far smaller firearms industry. Guns have undergone a transformation from useful tool to hobby item and now a campaign fueled by fear has created a new market of schools and senior citizens wanting to strap themselves with firearms because they fear a gun wielding madman may knock down their doors. The truth may be closer to what happened in New Mexico on January 20, 2013 when the teenage son in a family used two of the guns in the family home and killed the rest of his family. So are we protecting ourselves against the bad guy from without or arming the bad guy within our own midst.      

“Your Child Is Dead”

“Your child is dead.” Imagine that those words are said to you. Those are the most chilling words parents can hear and after going into shock they want to what happened. If the answer to that question is they were shot while they were at the mall, grocery store, restaurant, movie theater, church, college, high school or in their elementary school classroom by a disturbed individual with a lethal arsenal of guns, there is no understanding and it is unacceptable.  How many parents have to hear those chilling words before we become fed up enough to do something about it?

Newtown, Connecticut marked a new low in what someone will do to inflict pain on others to draw attention to whatever demons or issues he was dealing with. First he took the life of the person that brought him into the world and then extinguished the futures of 20 children just venturing into the outside world and scarred others across the nation with his actions. Six educators gave their lives during his rampage. How could a man walk into a room full of small children and do what this person did? This so-called man with premeditation put on body armor, loaded multiple weapons with ammunition and decided that on December 14, 2012 he would enter history as America’s greatest modern child killer.

If this does not throw cold water into the faces of those in positions of power to take action to put some kind of parameters on our out of control culture of gun worship, then we will just slide into the abyss. These little children had no chance in this situation. Some that will always say that there should be no restrictions on personal gun ownership are already trotting out the tired old response that the teachers should have been armed and they could have ended this earlier are just lost causes. When these determined human killing machines come on the scene suited up with body armor and military levels of firepower it is not a contest, because they have the element of surprise in an unexpected venue.

If we can’t grow enough of a spine now to stand up to the gun lobby, National Rifle Association and the money it threatens politicians with then nothing will ever change. The answer is not for everyone to walk around armed to the teeth. I don’t want to feel I need a machine gun in my home and on my person to feel safe. Hunters don’t need battlefield level weapons to hunt game. There is no need for what is going on in the name of a constitutional amendment written over 200 years ago by men that could not even conceive of modern weapons that would allow one man to kill so many so quickly.

Please, don’t tell me how many people are killed in car accidents annually and ask if we should we outlaw cars because that is a false comparison because cars are not specifically designed to kill. Car accidents are due to a number of factors, but usually mass murder intentions are not one of them. Spare me the guns don’t kill people, people kill people statement. People with guns kill people and people with assault weapons kill a lot of people quickly.

Everyday someone is getting a call informing them that their child, husband, wife or other loved one is dead at the hands of someone in possession of some mass killing machine that should never be wielded in civilian society. This horror should be enough for action and if it isn’t then there never will be enough. Pray for the families that lost their children and other loved ones during this horrific event.