From David Loftus at dailykos.com:
Has it occurred to you that you might have committed a fatal strategic error by throwing your lot behind the National Rifle Association?
Could you consider the possibility that over the past 40 years, the NRA chose a strategy that guaranteed it will ultimately lose the war to set domestic firearms policy?
Let’s not get into any of the specific arguments you’ve undoubtedly seen and defended in recent months and years: the nature and scope of the Second Amendment, the notion that guns protect one’s home, how many lives are supposedly saved by armed citizens versus lives lost, that guns will ultimately defend you against some sort of government tyranny.
Put those aside.
I want you to take a brief look at the big picture.
Consider the possibility that the NRA’s never-give-an-inch approach to U.S. firearms regulation might ultimately have set up you and other gun owners for failure in getting to have a say on the design of U.S. gun policy.
In order to understand this, you’ll have to try to view the situation from the perspective of the majority of your fellow citizens who are not so enthusiastic about gun ownership and national firearms policy as it’s been driven by the NRA in recent decades.
A basic, unassailable fact is that more than 30,000 American men, women, and children die every year from gunshot wounds. Or at least that was the case for many years past; the number may be climbing. It rose to 36,252 in 2015, and 38,658 in 2016, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
If those numbers sound high to you, that’s because most public debates over guns, especially if the NRA and activist gun owners present the stats, immediately cut suicides from the total, because those typically make up two-thirds all gun deaths. This has the virtue, from the gun advocate’s perspective, of making firearms fatalities mostly a matter of criminal, mentally ill, or terrorist shooters: It’s a “bad guy with a gun” issue. . . . .
Read the rest here. Poke holes in his argument below. As if I had to say that.