A Strange Campaign

It really is hard to understand the mindset of gun defending conservative Americans ....  

Campaign To Defend The 'Simple Semi-Automatic Rifle.'

 .... Rick Manning (President of Americans for Limited Government), has recently sent out an email, asking (or warning) all 'lovers of liberty' that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to ban semi-automatic rifles is likely to succeed.

ALG Email

 ... as though this is actually bad thing. Automatic and semi-automatic rifles are not for hunting animals, just for hunting humans. Single shot rifles are plenty good enough for either sport hunting, or even self defence, should that be your primary reason for having a rifle.

In his email Mr Manning urges everyone to 'email your congressman and senators immediately and tell them to stop this bill!' as its 'our last chance to stop Biden from banning virtually all simple semi-automatic rifles' .... as though the right to own 'simple semi-automatic rifles' is the key to having small government, and banning them will somehow reduce Americans liberty.

Now even if in general you have had sympathies for the conservative Republican party politics in the past, the current brand, since the Tea Party movement and then Donald Trump, distorted conservative Republicanism in to a far-right anti-libertarian parody of the party led by Lincoln, or Eisenhower, is often extremist and divisive in its policies, and that makes it an unattractive proposition to genuine conservatives. For instance being both anti-abortion and pro-'simple semi-automatic rifles' is a strange mix of political stances. 

One stance removes the liberties of millions of American women (in the name of pro-life), while the other contributes towards the deaths of 1.5 million Americans by firearms (suicides and murder) between 1968 and 2017 - that's actually more than the number of soldiers killed in every US war since the American War for Independence in 1775 until the retreat from Afghanistan in 2021.

The Figures Have Got Worse In USA Since 2017

The latest full figures show that in 2020, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun (both 19,384 homicides and 24,292 suicides), more than any previous year on record, and this is a also a 25 per cent increase from 2015, and a 43 per cent increase from just 2010. 

Even a comparison with the 2017 figures shows that the US gun related homicide figures are still getting worse at an accelerating rate compared with other western democracies .... how this carnage is defending liberty, only the far right can explain.