I've been waiting for three days for the biggest gun whore in the legislative branch to put his mouth where his money is. So far, he's staying holed up in some crack in the wall with the rest of his little six legged friends until someone turns the light off and they can go scurrying about their little fund raising businesses again.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is, as near as we can find out, the recipient of more than a half million bucks in gun lobby money over the course of his political career, making him pretty much the highest paid gun whore and enabler of baby killers in the congress. Oh, there are others, hundreds of them when you combine the two houses but in tallying up McCain'€™s obligation to the gun lobbies we have to take into account the $425k he got from them for his presidential campaign. Now we'€™re going to be looking at how he'€™s justified their investment in him. For that kind of bucks, you know damned well they expected some significant ROI and there'€™s no reason to believe that Mr. McCain hasn'€™t met their expectations.
Since the good senator has... at the time of this writing... refused to face the American public since the horror Friday and explain his support for weapons of mass personal destruction in the hands of anyone... no matter how sick or depraved they might be... with the ready cash and a buddy at the cop shop, we'€™ll just have to go back six months to right after the Aurora shooting and this Raw Story article by David Edwards for his senatorial views on gun control in general.
The first thing that grabs you is the headline, €œMcCain: No proof gun control prevents gun violence€ Leaves one wondering just what the senator would accept as proof in view of the fact that for the past 30 years we'€™ve had a steady relaxing of the laws that used to give us some control over the amount of damage some deranged fuckwit could do to ourselves or our fellow citizens before someone took him down accompanied by an almost directly proportional increase on the number of mass shooting incidents.
You would think that a man smart enough to graduate from Annapolis (albeit fourth from the bottom of his class) and fly highly sophisticated (not to mention expensive) aircraft (while only crashing four or possibly five of them)... wait a minute, you know what? Either the man is capable of making the correlation or he'€™s not. If he is and is simply using his bully pulpit to express the will of the ignorant rednecks who are liplocked to the far right fringe of the Republican party and who either can'€™t understand it or are in denial, he'€™s earned his cockroach award right there. He'€™s obviously smart enough to whore himself out to the baby killer lobby and marry rich, Let'€™s just assume he can add 2 and 2 and move on.
While the interview was supposed to be taking place largely in the light of the Aurora shootings, Mr McCain seems to go to great pains to keep the focus on the gazillion right wing and gun lobby talking points with which they have traditionally sought to deflect any honest discussion of what has become a problem of epidemic proportions. He even managed to work in the Norway incident as part of his obligatory “Gun Control doesn’t work” meme.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says there is no proof that gun control leads to less gun violence, but he is willing to €œlook at everything€ following a massacre in Aurora, Colorado that left least 12 dead and 58 wounded.One incident in Norway and this man totally blows off the fact that in the entire group of €œ"civilized"€ countries, ours is the only one that allows free and easy access to weapons designed for the sole purpose of killing other human beings and that no other developed nation has a firearms related death and injury count that even approaches that of the United States.€œI don'€™t know, to tell you the truth, what we can do, and this immediately leads to the issue of gun control, € McCain told CNN'€™s Candy Crowley. €œThe killer in Norway, which is a country that has very strict gun control laws, and yet he was still able to acquire the necessary means to initiate and carry out a mass slaughter.€
€œI think we need to look at everything, if that even should be looked at, but to think that somehow gun control is ” or increased gun control is the answer, in my view, that would have to be proved, he added.
He totally ignores the fact that in all the other developed countries those with tight gun laws have death counts mere fractions of ours and that INCLUDES Norway. He'€™s apparently oblivious to the fact that Australia passed laws against assault and military style weapons after an American style massacre there and they've never had another one. And he damned sure isn'€™t about to point out that in all those countries with tight controls over military style implements of slaughter, no government boogey men have come forth and grabbed their legitimate hunting/sporting weapons and plunged those countries into some kind of Muslim based servitude.
€œYou get to this point, you don't want the government spying on what people are buying,€ she explained. €œOn the other hand, what€™s the price? The price is all these things we just read off.€I'€™m going to go back through my feeds now and check to see if McCain or any of the 30 other NRA whores in the senate have come through with any kind of statement to the American people as to their reactions to what happened Friday. Surely three days is long enough to come up with some way to say the same old shit without having it look like you'€™re just saying the same old shit. As for Wayne fricking LaPierre, I may not be able to take active part part in the hanging but I'€™ll damned sure gladly pay for a new rope.€œLet'€™s remember it'€™s a constitutional right,€ McCain replied. €œSecond of all, if you could prove the case that it, indeed, has a positive effect €” we had a ban on assault weapons that expired some years ago, it didn'€™t change the situation at all in my view. €
€œSo, I think the strongest Second Amendment rights people would be glad to have an conversation, but the conclusion that this was somehow caused by the fact that we don'€™t have more gun control legislation, I don'€™t think has been proved. €
According to a 1997 study (PDF) published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the U.S. had a firearm homicide rate 23 times higher than Norway, which McCain cited in his remarks.
More recent 2009 data showed that the U.S. had a firearm homicide rate that was about 15 times higher than €œpopulous, high-income countries,€ and 10 times higher than the €œwestern countries€ belonging to NATO.