To a certain category of intellectual, left and right, everything is always explained by money.
Well, not everything is explained by money.
On this occasion, we focus on Robert Reich, who tends to be focused mostly on money, and while we sometimes enjoy his analysis, and whose columns we have linked in at this site, we find to be often acting with blinders on.
Here's Bob's latest after the recent Tennessee shooting:
The lives of our children or the greed of gun manufacturers?
This concept, that it's firearms manufacturer's greed that causes US violence, is a common one, but it's bunk.
I've written about the AR15 Effect here before, and I'll be frank that the firearms' industry, which has played along with the glorification of combat arms, shares in a big portion of the blame for causing American gun culture to evolve from hunting and the field to imagined combat. It's definitely happened. But the firearms' industry mostly followed the development, not caused it. Indeed, some major manufacturers, Sturm Ruger being one such example, resisted the urge to make rifles with an AR15 appearance until market forces were so far down the path that continuing on in that direction was simply pointless.
To an extent, manufacturers deserve some blame for popularizing weapons that have a combat aura to them, but perhaps the NRA, which went from focusing on hunting rifles and target rifles to frequently featuring combat sort of firearms, in an effort to boost the fear of its members deserves some too. Indeed, blaming manufacturers puts the cart before the horse. The AR15 has been around since the 60s and served in military hands for many years before it obtained its current reputation. The gun didn't create its own specialized market, but the market somehow evolved around the gun.
But it's not just that. It's something deeper. Bob's fellows have cried for years about how killing infants in the wombs is A-OK, as women get to go to work, their bodies flushed of infant, and that's kid, while indoctrinating a culture that killing a perceived problem somehow remains wrong. You can't really have both. The culture at large has gone from one in which many individuals had experienced military service and left it behind, to one in which men in uniform, nearly any uniform, are absolutely worshiped. Presently the political left is busy ripping down what few standards remain, if they can, proclaiming such nonsensical monikers as LGBTQIAP2S+? real, when clearly they're delusional.
And we're surprised our politics have become extreme, and some violently unhinged?
Does that mean that we aren't at the point where legislation regulating semi-automatic rifles, of some sort, remains beyond being considered? Politically, that probably is where we are at.
But make no mistake, even if legislation passed tomorrow placing semi-automatic rifles into the same category as fully automatic ones, it wouldn't address having dumped the mentally ill out on to the street and treating them as normal, flooding the streets with drugs, some legal and illegal, and continuing to have policies that treat the labor pool as if its 1953 rather than 1923.
That's going to take a lot of work, and neither political party has the slightest intent of engaging in it.
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