Monday, July 2, 2012

Abuse of By-back Program

The NRA is fond of promoting the insanity and poor critical thinking of the phrase "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
A more factually correct statement summing up the causal and correlational relationship between firearms and people killing people is that people using guns kill people. Sometimes the people they kill are other people, sometimes the people they kill are themselves, and sometimes they only wound, trheaten, harass or intimidate people.
The NRA tries to pretend that firearms are not lethal weapons; that is inherently dishonest.  The NRA makes money for gun manufacturers by promoting a violent gun culture, one which advocates for gun violence in order to sell more guns for the gun manufacturers they represent.  They promote laws which make it easier, not more difficult, for guns to be sold that go directly and indirectly into the hands of criminals and terrorists, because their goal is to sell more guns.
That they are not primarily focused on legal gun use, but rather on maiximizing gun sales is evident in the NRA having someone on their board like Ted Nugent, a chronic advocate for violence against individuals with whom he disagrees, and a serial violator of laws.  That they intend to promote a violent gun culture where people take the law into their own hands is evident in the material and positions they take, as evidenced by their spokespeople and their statements.
Police should know what the quality is of the guns they purchase in these buybacks.  The situation should be corrected so that an appropriate minimum and maximum are established depending on the state and quality of the firearm in these purchases to prevent this kind of abuse.  But it is also a statement of their lack of character that this group would act this way; it is an indication of the contempt for the boundaries between legal and illegal firearms that this group would undermine an effort by the police to get illegal guns off the streets.

From MSNBC.com :

Chicago gun buyback unknowingly raises money for NRA kids' gun camp

Chicago’s firearm buyback program, titled “Don’t kill a dream, save a life,” aims to get dangerous weapons off the street. But a pro-gun rights group gleefully says it used the program to turn in “non-firing junk” to raise money for a National Rifle Association youth shooting camp.
Guns Save Life, based in Champaign, Ill., three hours south of Chicago, turned in dozens of guns and BB guns it had collected – “rusty scrap metal,” the group called the load – taking home $6,240.
Of the 5,500 guns turned in on June 23, 60 came from Guns Save Life.
The Chicago Police Department program pays $100 for every gun and $10 every BB gun, air gun or replica, no questions asked. The money is given in the form of a Visa debit card.
“We are redirecting funds from people who would work against the private ownership of firearms to help introduce the next generation to shooting safely and responsibly,” John Boch, head of Guns Save Life, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Boch said the money will go toward paying for ammunition for the youth camp.
Police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton was not amused, according to the Sun-Times.
“It’s unfortunate that this group is abusing a program intended to increase the safety of our communities,” Stratton said.

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