National Rifle Association, a Terrorist Organization?

It’s considered anti-American by too many in the United States to ask for gun control legislation. Assassination attempts in recent memory (Reagan) and successes (Kennedy), mass shootings – well, we get to add the white supremacist hate-crime-church-9-person-hate-murders in Charleston, South Carolina on June 18^th to the very long, long, long list of NRA-legislative-beneficiaries-turned-serial-killers-or-just-plain-murderers.

You may be a part of the growing chorus of anti-Obama constituents on both sides of the aisle, but when the truth of our wayward ways pours out, exactly how much longer can we afford to ignore the obvious? “President Obama on [June 19^th] reiterated his call for new gun controls, speaking at a United States Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco, saying that a shift in public opinion was needed to force Congress to act. ‘Every country has unstable, hateful people,’ he said. ‘What’s different is not every country is awash with easily accessible guns.’” New York Times, June 19^th.

And there not the slightest doubt that as gun laws make it easier to access guns; that fact alone is responsible for a serious rise in the raw murder rates in the states where such laws have passed, and virtually all of the rise is by reason of “death by gun.” Need the actual statistics? I refer you to my recent (June 16^th) blog – Giving It Our Best Shot – for irrefutable evidence to such effect, notwithstanding a mostly-successful effort by the NRA (legislation to such effect pushed by that gun-lobbying group) to prevent governments from gathering such gun homicide numbers.

The NRA tells you that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Get real! Using a gun is a really efficient way of killing. It is quick, allows you a distance from your victim and avoids the messy and bloody alternatives like stabbing, bludgeoning or the inglorious writhing around of a poison victim. And it usually results in death versus recovery from a beating or even a stabbing. It’s the killing “easy button,” allowing rage to be instantly gratified. Of course having pervasive availability of guns increases the murder rates as the hard numbers conclusively prove! Duh-oh!

“The FBI defines terrorism as: The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” About.com. Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, would seem to fall squarely within this definition; he openly advocated beginning a race war against African-Americans based on his attack. An accessory to a crime, also having criminal responsibility, falls into the following categories (according to The Free Dictionary): “The prosecution must establish that the accessory in some way instigated, furthered, or concealed the crime. Typically, punishment for a convicted accessory is not as severe as that for the perpetrators…

“An accessory must knowingly promote or contribute to the crime. In other words, she or he must aid or encourage the offense deliberately, not accidentally. The accessory may withdraw from thecrime by denouncing the plans, refusing to assist with the crime, contacting the police, or trying to stop the crime from occurring.” The NRA knows statistically that their efforts increase the probability of guns being used for the wrong purpose. 

Given these definitions, the NRA would seem to be a legally and criminally responsible accessory of terrorist activities as responsible for the death and destruction of gun-infused criminality across the land as if they handed the bomb to Oklahoma federal building bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Likewise, it would seem under the laws of most jurisdictions,  it is hard to find that the NRA cannot be added as an accessory to most gun crimes, no matter where the gun came from, and since the crime here is easily labeled terrorism, that would, in my opinion, make the NRA an accessory to actual acts of terrorism. Throw in the all-encompassing federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (R.I.C.O.) Act into the mix, add up all the assault weapons they have pushed into our country, and you can take the NRA and their entire senior management, try and convict them… and throw away the key.

That their primary motivation is to sell more guns to a country that already has almost one gun for every man, woman and child in the United States is not exculpatory. That’s the “capitalism/First Amendment” excuse that doesn’t excuse drug dealers either. The NRA absolutely knows what its policies have caused. Their lobbying efforts to prevent governmental agencies from generating gun homicide statistics are a tacit admission of their guilt. They have successfully championed easier access to guns as well as statutes that permit gun owners to kill without consequences (under so-called “castle” and “stand your ground” statutes that have been adopted by a majority of states). They have stopped all attempts to limit large magazines and assault rifles that have no purpose other than to maximize the number of human being that can be killed in a short burst. That AR-15 pictured above is one such weapon.

The litany of accessory/RICO crimes that should, in my opinion, be charged against the NRA could begin with the list of school and college killings I provided back on November 9, 2014 in my Americans Love Guns So Much More than Their Children blog. But Americans are so callous, so enamored of own gun ownership, that any politician who dares suggest that we insert reasonable gun control into our daily lives usually loses their next election. In my view, the NRA management are old world crime bosses, thugs bought and paid for by U.S. gun-makers, who have intimidated the American political scene to allow the United States to be viewed by every developed nation on earth as a rogue nation awash in guns and laws that excuse using them in the killing of human beings.

The NRA is a despicable and heartless organization. Their initial reaction to the Charleston shootings say it all, and even this cowardly organization was forced to back off: “Faced with an online backlash, a member of the National Rifle Association’s board deleted comments Friday [June 19^th] criticizing the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a South Carolina lawmaker who was one of the nine people shot and killed in the attack on his church in Charleston on Wednesday night.

“The N.R.A. official, Charles L. Cotton, argued in an online discussion that Mr. Pinckney, a state senator, bore some responsibility for the other deaths because he had opposed a change to South Carolina’s gun laws that would have made it legal to carry a concealed weapon into a church.” New York Times (First Draft, June 19^th). Yeah, a parishioner could have pulled his or her concealed weapon and saved the day. Disgusting distortion! For an organization that was originally created to teach gun safety, the NRA has gone terribly, terribly wrong. But note that however the NRA may have twisted and squirmed to provide legal justification for their support of this killing machine, our highly misinterpreted Constitutional “gun rights” provision does not require such flagrantly open use of guns.

You hear very few gun-advocates ever mention the first phrase of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – the motivation for citizen soldiers to clamber for the right to own the weapons they need to defend their nation: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The right to bear arms is not exempted from regulation and control, and access truly needs to be reconfigured to comport with that phase in red above. It’s time to hold people who have made killing so easy, so pervasive, all in the pursuit of the almighty dollar – just like a cartel leader – criminally responsible for what they have wrought.

I’m Peter Dekom, and let me answer my own question posited in the title above: hell yes!