Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

What a great braying jackass . . . i made no such claim. So now you have to lie about what i've written in order to have something to sneer at. You're pathetic.

the NRA's front is more fearsome than its reality. Most of the candidates they backed lost in the last elections. and a significant number of their members disagree with the leadership.

It's time to focus the discussion on the real issue right now--which is how best to reduce the gun violence that impacts our public welfare--and do that without paranoid hysteria, without scenarios of dictators disarming the public, without scenarios of the need to re-fight another armed revolution against the government.

Our democracy is firmly in place, and we will maintain its strength considerably better by exercising our First Amendment rights of free speech, and our strength at the ballot box, then we ever will by trying to turn our entire citizenry into an armed force, fearful of each other, and scrambling to acquire and stockpile the most lethal weapons they can get their hands on.

The NRA is huge and it is growing.

Over the last 18 days NRA membership has grown by over 100K.

The NRA is huge and it is growing.

Quote:

The NRA is huge and it is growing.

So is the coalition of responsible citizens, including many gun owners, calling for effective government action to address and reduce our problems with gun violence.

MontereyJack wrote:

the NRA's front is more fearsome than its reality. Most of the candidates they backed lost in the last elections. and a significant number of their members disagree with the leadership.

And that's why the time is right to challenge their domination of gun policies/politics in this country. Not only is their political clout relatively insignificant in terms of their influence on election outcomes,

If the NRA continues to maintain its intractable position it will be left out of the discussion seeking solutions to the gun violence problem, it will marginalize its influence even more.

We cannot deal with this problem without some willingness to compromise on everyone's part.

The issue right now is not the right of responsible gun owners to possess appropriate weapons for self defense, or home defense, or hunting, or target shooting, nor is that right under attack,

nor is this the beginning of a government gun ban to be followed by a seizure of everyone's guns, despite the attempts of the NRA to frame the discussion that way.

This is not really a 2nd Amendment issue--it's a public health and safety issue.

It's time to focus the discussion on the real issue right now--which is how best to reduce the gun violence that impacts our public welfare--and do that without paranoid hysteria,

The scenario of Obama & Biden disarming the public is real, your referring to them as dictators is scary

but it does sound as though you would entertain an effort to get guns out of the hands of 'known' criminals..

H2O MAN wrote:

The NRA is huge and it is growing.

So is the coalition of responsible citizens, including many gun owners, calling for effective government action to address and reduce our problems with gun violence.

President Barack Obama is considering the use of an executive order to restrict access to guns or ammunition in the wake of nationwide revulsion in the US over the Connecticut school shootings, vice-president Joe Biden said Wednesday.

Such a move would be deeply controversial in the gun lobby, but Biden said the president was determined to explore every legislative avenue.

"The president is going to act," Biden said in a briefing to reporters before the inaugural meeting of a new national task force on gun control. "Executive order, executive action that can be taken; we haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and all the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action, we believe, is required."

Biden did not specify what kind of action the president might take. In the past the Obama administration has used executive orders, which have the force of law, to require gun dealers to report when customers buy multiple high-powered rifles and to increase penalties for violating gun laws. A new order, nearly certain to face legal challenges, could seek to tighten enforcement of laws governing private sales of guns or to beef up background checks.

"We are not going to get caught up in the notion that unless we can do everything we're going to do nothing," Biden said. "It's critically important that we act."

Any unilateral action by the president seemed sure to inflame gun advocates, who argue that gun sales are protected under the second amendment and who equate gun control with tyranny. Gun-rights groups are organising a "Gun Appreciation Day" on the weekend of the president's second inauguration. The influential conservative website the Drudge Report illustrated the story covering Biden's remarks with pictures of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

Biden said that the 14 December massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, in which 20 first-graders were shot dead in their classrooms by a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle, had mobilised the nation to act.

"Every once in a while there's something that awakens the conscience of the country, and that tragic event did it in a way like nothing I've seen in my career," Biden said.

The national taskforce includes the victims of mass shootings and gun control advocates. The group plans to meet Thursday with representatives of the National Rifle Association and gun retailers including Walmart. The taskforce was to deliver recommendations to the president as early as mid-month.

New York could become the first state to pass gun control laws after the Connecticut massacre, aides to Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in advance of his annual address planned for Wednesday afternoon. Lawmakers in Albany worked late into the night Tuesday to settle on new rules to further restrict the sales of assault rifles and large-capacity magazines, and to require the regular renewal of gun permits, among other measures.

The NRA has vocally opposed calls for new gun control legislation, saying that more guns are needed to improve public safety.

"If it's crazy to call for armed officers in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," NRA head Wayne LaPierre said a week after the Connecticut shooting. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."

Deaths from guns are on pace to surpass traffic deaths in the United States by 2015, according to a Bloomberg News study. In 2011, the latest year for which detailed statistics are available, there were 12,664 murders in the US. Of those, 8,583 were caused by firearms, down 3% from a year earlier.

The Biden taskforce is part of new wave of gun control activity across the country. Former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in a 2011 massacre in Tucson that killed six, announced on Tuesday the formation of a political action committee to fight the NRA.

"Special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe have used big money and influence to cow Congress into submission," she wrote in an editorial with husband Mark Kelly, an astronaut. "Rather than working to find the balance between our rights and the regulation of a dangerous product, these groups have cast simple protections for our communities as existential threats to individual liberties."

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is heading up a campaign called Demand a Plan that has produced dozens of videos in which family members of victims of gun violence call for new gun laws. Advocates have proposed a coalition of mothers against gun violence that would be modeled after Madd, the anti-drunken driving group that succeeded in lowering the legal blood-alcohol content for drivers nationally.

It is not unconstitutional for the Congress to regulate firearms of any description

Taft High School Shooting: Suspect In Custody In Taft, California
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/taft-high-school-shooting_n_2449261.html

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... Biden said that the 14 December massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, in which 20 first-graders were shot dead in their classrooms by a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle...

That's right, you are wrong again.