Doctors are honest people and honest people tend to assume honesty in others. The assumption here is that the NRA, while ideologically deranged, still wants whats best for its members, and the country as a whole - this is a mistake. Welcome to the concept of "astroturf".
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Astroturf refers to organizations that appear to be "grassroots" but in reality, serve a industry interest, often to the detriment of actual living breathing humans in the service of profit. The NRA has become such an institution - but it wasn't always this way.
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Instead it's an organization that from it's founding in 1871 through the 60s was a relatively apolitical, focused on teaching marksmanship and representing sportsmen and hunters. In the 1960s in the face of civil strife and growing black gun ownership, it supported gun control.
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10 years later in 1977 it was hijacked by group of true believers upset about the encroachment of gun control laws. They then used the NRA arsenal of media to promote gun ownership as an "individual" right - and were natural allies of a voracious industry.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-nras-true-believers-converted-a-marksmanship-group-into-a-mighty-gun-lobby/2013/01/12/51c62288-59b9-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.34a54c60bc47 …
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Throughout the 80s the US saw increased violence, commercial sale of semiautomatics, and right wing terrorism - Tim McVeigh's bombing of OKC revealed the modern militia movement - Americans were growing more concerned the easy availability of guns was arming all the wrong people.
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The influence of the organization waned such that in 1994 we passed the Assault Weapons Ban - a relatively useless piece of legislation restricting weapons based on superficial characteristics, and with a built-in expiration date. But gun rights, and profits, were under assault.
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Also at the same time, and not to be underestimated as a threat to gun industry profits, research by Kellerman into gun ownership was discovering one of the main commercial strategies of gun sales of handguns and semiautomatic rifles was completely bogus.https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506 …
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A gun in the home *increases* your risk of homicide. This is the "cigarettes cause cancer" finding that the gun industry could not abide because it undermines their "home defense" commercial strategy - and like the tobacco industry their solution was to attack the science itself.
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The industry could never support handgun production levels without home defense - a justification for a gun in every home - because handguns are pretty useless. They're fun, but they're expensive, suck for hunting, and if they don't even make you safer? What's the point?
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With lawsuits against the tobacco industry showing the writing on the wall, they knew they had to act. Enter the Dickey amendment. No federal funds for research that could be seen as "promoting gun control." This cast a pall over gun violence research. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1487470 …
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Even Dickey himself later came to regret pushing the legislation. As gun violence continued to rise the amendment affected all gun violence research - because guess what, a lot of it doesn't have anything to do with banning guns.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/time-for-collaboration-on-gun-research/2015/12/25/f989cd1a-a819-11e5-bff5-905b92f5f94b_story.html?utm_term=.f8f47662f23a …
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This antiscientific tactic exposes the profit motive behind the NRA, its Victory Fund, and lobbying through it's legislative arm - the Institute for Legislative Action - such that critics have described the NRA as "a virtual subsidiary of the gun industry" https://www.businessinsider.com/gun-industry-funds-nra-2013-1 …
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Advocates for gun owners wouldn't oppose science that shows risks to gun owners! If you really cared about such a constituency, rather than profits, you would ask for more research - why are they less safe? Do we need safer storage? Better safeties? Is it certain people or ages?
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We can't answer any of these questions because the answers may hurt sales for home defense. We also lost the ability to seek answers to questions like how do guns end up in criminal hands? How does trafficking occur? Can we ID groups more likely to victimize or be victims?
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Researchers persisted, even spending their own money to finance their research, and so, heroically, folks like Kellerman and Wintemute went on to confirm this research, over and over, and answer more questions. So what do we know now, despite the attempts to silence research?
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For one thing we know we haven't made progress on the problem. One common retort from gun nuts is, "cars kill more people, you don't ban cars." Well, no one is talking about bans, and car regulations resulted in cars now killing *fewer* people than guns.https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1661391 …
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But we might have made progress on safety if we didn't spend less on this problem compared to any other cause of death or injury relative to it's impact on our lives. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2595514 …
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The gun industry is not representing gun owners. In poll after poll, the majority of gun owners, and even NRA members, approve of anti-trafficking measures such as universal background checks.https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/MonmouthPoll_US_030818/ …
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Why oppose this? Because guns a durable product, and trafficking represents a continual way to offload older arms (at shows or private sales) so gun owners can help finance new products. Or a common scam is to report stolen, then claim insurance and privately sell.
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Illegal guns are not durable, they are used, ditched, and often confiscated and destroyed. Without a market that disposes of guns, the gunmakers will saturate the legal market. If checks are universal, you might lose the illegal market. Why else object? It takes 5 minutes.
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We've also learned that much of gun violence is structural. It's the vestiges of racist policy that concentrates poverty and disempowered minorities from enjoying economic progress like homeownership and social mobility - like redlining. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617303398?via%3Dihub …
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Hey, if that's true, maybe if you improved neighborhoods and spent money on blight you can reduce gun violence without bans? Yeah, that's right. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622816305707?via%3Dihub …https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129582 …
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Also turns out, gun violence spreads like a communicable disease. Although is it "hot people" or "hot places" is a source of debate. This is research that has nothing to do with bans. The NRA uses the ban narrative because they don't want solutions, they profit from gun violence.
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So, like the Tobacco Companies, they will never be a public health ally. And while Big Tobacco said, "doubt is our product" that strategy is less effective in lead-delivery devices - we know where the bullets come from. Look out for my next thread - Discord is their Product.
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Twitter avatar some variant of the Punisher skull? Instablock activate! Person self-identifies as singularly obsessed with 2A? Instablock activate!
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End of conversation
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