No matter how bad of a president Ronald Reagan was for myriad reasons, he did have enough sense to advocate for measures to protect the people from themselves without deleting the 2nd Amendment. In fact, President Obama and sane Democrats’ gun safety proposals are not as robust as those that Reagan promoted, but of course Reagan was a white guy.
Reagan said “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an assault rifle is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.” He also signed legislation as California governor “prohibiting the carrying of firearms on your person, in your vehicle, and in any public place or on the street,” as well as a 15-day waiting period for firearm purchases.
On signing gun safety laws, the GOP demigod said, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” As president, Ronald Reagan signed a ban on fully automatic rifles, supported legislation for background checks, a waiting period for potential gun owners, and was an ardent supporter of a ban on assault-weapons and the Brady Bill.
Of course, those days are history and Republicans are unwilling to “take their country back” to an era of gun safety sense; they are just too afraid of everything. It is why there is not a chance in Hell there will be any legislation to help protect Americans from gun violence, and if there were it would be fundamentally useless with the past six years of NRA fear-mongering and gun proliferation that created an already well-armed population.
One commentator said the status quo on guns in the US will never change without “overwhelming political force” because evidence, death tolls, or rational debate will never have any effect on gun zealots. That assessment is only half right.
To garner “overwhelming political force” for minimal gun safety laws, a significant number of Americans will have to be convinced using evidence and debate. With a terrified population, and guns and gun violence now informing America’s “worldview and identity” as a “structurally violent society,” evidence and persuasion, even emotional persuasion, to change is futile no matter how many mass shootings or gun casualties.
It is noteworthy that with well-over 300 million and counting guns in a population of roughly 320 million, any attempt at using “overwhelming political force” to pass a gun safety law will be met with “overwhelming firepower;” it is the result of Republican, the NRA, “false patriots,” and conservative conditioning of the population with pathological brain deformities and psychological dysfunction. For America, the die is cast and mass shootings and out-of-control gun deaths are here to stay; the idea of America being any different than violent nations like Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly arguable.
Every single time there is a mass shooting, a couple-hundred Americans seriously believe the deaths and carnage will provide the emotional and convincing argument to halt the proliferation of guns. But to terrified gun zealots, every mass shooting provides another undeniable and convincing argument that what America needs most is more guns, not less.
As surrogate for the National Rifle Association, frightened evangelical Cuban-Canadian immigrant Ted Cruz said the increase in mass shootings means that now more than ever, “the American people must be armed to get rid of bad guys by using our guns.”
Cruz took advantage of the conservative brain’s abnormalities and psychological dysfunction and said gun safety measures are President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s plan to “strip us of our fundamental right to protect our homes, our lives, and our families while they refuse to protect America and stand up to Islam.” It was typical fear mongering that Cruz knows easily manipulates his terrified, psychologically bent, and abnormal-brained base.
According to an ever-growing body of psychological and social scientific research, the reason “liberals and conservatives disagree about politics is because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and physiological and genetic traits.” Translation: conservatives are physically abnormal and psychologically incapable of not being frightened and cannot exist without a loaded firearm at their side.
In a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, research shows that “political conservatives have a negativity bias meaning they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments;” it is why Republicans have such an easy task keeping their base frightened of everything that is “not white and evangelically conservative.”
Other research this column has referenced in the past to demonstrate why Republican voters, although dirt stupid, are driven by abject fear is due to an abnormality in the brain preventing them from normal human cognitive and emotional dynamics. The Hibbing research teams found, and reported, that conservatives have larger right amygdalae than liberals or normal human beings.
A normal amygdalae regulates basic pleasure and fear responses that conservatives are incapable of performing. Besides being terrified of anything Republicans tell them to, an abnormally functioning amygdala is responsible for a world of psychological disorders and conditions including wild irrational fear, high anxiety and PTSD.
As the President has reiterated often, if Republicans and their frightened base could not be moved to support the most basic gun safety law, background checks, after 20 children and six adults were slaughtered like animals, by a white Christian, nothing will move them to act. It does not matter if it is a mass shooting in a theatre, church, women’s health clinic, or a school campus, Republicans will not act because they are as frightened of the NRA as their base is everything non-Christian, non-white, and non-male. Although prayers are not going to stop gun violence or mass shootings, if it makes decent people feel better, then by all means pray away because it is about effective as what this country is doing now.
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