Why there aren't more NRA members

Throughout this latest assault on the Second Amendment, I have been blogging about the dirty politics and the whipped up hysteria, the fake claims and the weirdly spiteful worldview of the anti-gun contingent. I feel it is important to cover that stuff. You have to go back 20 years to recall an anti-gun political storm comparable to this one, and in several ways, this one is worse. It attacks not only gun owners' choices but their privacy.

As a blogger I can push some buttons and find out about the traffic visiting my blog. I cannot tell who is visiting but I can tell when, how many they are and which articles they are reading. And I have seen something startling. Even at the height of the gun control mania, my most popular articles were about gun tech. Not the politics, but the nuts and bolts of shooting irons, sights and so forth.

It seems to me that therein is an explanation of why we have only five million NRA members carrying the political action burden for more than a hundred million gun owners, and even tinier percentages of shooters belonging to the other gun rights outfits. A whole lot of readers here would rather skip the politics. In the real world outside the blogosphere, that translates into the fellow who enjoys his guns but isn't much interested in the process by which they are kept in his possession. I suppose that if confiscation orders came down he would shrug, turn in his guns and interest himself in other toys.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is a passionate interest only among those who see what it means, and how the country would be different if that right went away. It requires some understanding of the events leading to our country's founding, or else it requires an insight into tyranny and liberty in general. People who have lived under totalitarian regimes get it. Those who have never done such a thing should give some thought to what it would be like to have your life micromanaged by bureaucrats, with little chance of bettering your life because you do not have many choices before you. Of course gun control is a cornerstone of overbearing regimes. Although gun control is only one aspect of political tyranny, it seems to be a vital one.

Of course not all countries that have strict gun control are jackboot tyrannies, but all that are, do. The rest have no sure guarantee that they will not wake up some morning to find Big Brother watching them. I dunno. I appreciate my gun tech only readers, the ones who read the nuts and bolts articles and skip the politics, for I share their keen interest in shooting hardware. I am pleased and proud that they like my articles. I would, though, like to encourage them to think beyond the neat hardware and involve themselves in the political side, join the NRA or some other gun rights group, and pick up their slack in supporting their right to own guns in the first place. But to get them to read this, I'm probably going to have to intersperse my thoughts amidst an in depth review of the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver, or something. My stats show that readers like that don't click on articles like this one. Sheesh.