How Come LGBTQ Can’t Figure Out Gun Violence?

Today’s LGBTQNation website is carrying an editorial on the mass shooting in Lewiston, provoked in part I suspect because the shooter was allegedly angered over comments made about his sexual behavior by individuals who may have been in the bar or the bowling alley which he turned into shooting galleries before ending his own life.

The editorial goes through all the usual issues about how other countries are much better at regulating guns than we are, and ends with the following: “What will it take for us to reverse the unholy alliance between corporate America and powerful pressure groups controlling politicians in the service of firearms manufacturers?”

Alliance between corporate America and powerful pressure groups? I have been hearing about this alliance as the deus ex machina behind gun violence in the United States for I don’t know how long, but I don’t recall reading an editorial about gun violence which didn’t, in one way or another, make this same point.

Everybody knows that the National Rifle Association has all these politicians in its pocket and distributes immense amounts of cash largesse every two years. Everybody also knows that the gun industry gets all kinds of regulatory favors from the government which allows the industry to escape responsibility for the deadly use of its products.