Am no fan of Trevor Noah’s, but accidentally caught the last 2 or 3 minutes of a rant by his guest Ryan Busse a few days ago. The latter seemed to me to be just another crazed Leftist given to ridiculous exaggerations. Upon research I discovered that he had written a book entitled “Gunfight: My Battle against the Industry that Radicalized America.” The industry in question, of which he was himself a part, is the gun industry. That that industry as represented by the NRA had “radicalized” America, seemed to me a grossly simplistic hypothesis. I still believe that to be so. But his critique of the NRA and those Republicans who mindlessly support it, also has much merit.
An article posted by the Montana Free Press on Oct. 22 entitled “Who wants the ‘bad guys’ to have guns?” included a lengthy excerpt from Busse’s book. In the aftermath of the horrific 2012 shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Mount Elementary School in which Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 six and seven year olds, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in tandem with Republican Pat Toomey sought the passage of an amendment which would ban the sale of arms at gun shows where purchasers are subject to no background checks whatsoever. While it is perfectly rational that sane, law abiding citizens should be allowed to defend themselves, the unmonitored distribution of weapons to potential psychopaths is truly insane. Yet the Manchin/Toomey amendment, endorsed by then Vice President Joe Biden, was defeated in 2013.
I am certainly no expert on this issue, but if the NRA opposed this piece of legislation simply to ensure gun sale profits, both it and those Republicans who supported it ought to be ashamed of themselves. While I would defend my “conservatism” as a matter of both Reason and Morality, when those who purport to be “conservatives” betray those values, they need to be called out. Capitalism is demonstrably preferable to its various authoritarian, collectivist alternatives, yet at the same time those human freedoms it ensures in the pursuit of personal profit and fulfillment need to be subject to strict rational/moral supervision.