Pistol packin' pastors: Gun lobby's likely recipe to end church massacres

The shooting deaths of nine innocent blacks in the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina by racist Dylann Roof is tragic enough but it is merely the latest, and by no means the last, gun death outrage in America which can be laid at the feet of the US gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Sadly, their warped point of view that since guns don’t maim and kill but people do and more guns mean greater safety, is on the rise. Thanks to them guns, guts and gore will blight the American landscape for the foreseeable future.

The NRA began is existence as a gun safety organization whose members consisted mostly of hunters. Starting with the administration of Ronald Reagan, who played many gunmen in his long acting career, the NRA became radicalized.

It is the nightmare of every elected official at national, state and local level in America because the organization can and does shoot down any official who opposes its bloody agenda.

It’s deadly effective at getting its way. It even convinced the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn more than two centuries of settled jurisprudence that limited the right to bear arms to state militias. The result is that there are more guns than people in America, and gun deaths and injuries are so commonplace that it generally takes big body counts to make headlines.

After the 2012 tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza gunned down 26 elementary school students and adults, there was nationwide grief, shock and anger, with many people calling for more gun control measures.

The gun lobby, led by the NRA, after a loud, long and deafening silence called not for more gun controls but for more guns in schools in the hands of armed security guards and teachers. They claimed that gun control was the problem, not the guns.

So I imagine that soon the NRA will be saying that the way to solve this problem is obvious: pistol packin’ pastors, armed to protect their flock against any intruder.

The gun lobby is active in pushing its agenda to further arm America to the teeth as one of their 2015 priorities is to allow people to carry hidden, loaded handguns in public without a permit.

Currently, only four states do not require a permit for carrying a concealed weapon, but in the first three months of this year, 20 states have introduced bills to remove this lifesaving and logical public safety measure.

They will probably succeed. Fueled by lobbying and contributions from members, including gun manufacturers, for the first time more Americans now say that protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership, 52 percent to 46 percent.

For most of the 1990s and after, a substantial majority of Americans believed it was more important to control guns than to protect gun owners’ rights. But last December, the balance of public opinion flip-flopped.

The author is a senior adviser to Tsinghua University and former director and vice-director of ABC Television in New York.