Bill Moyers takes on the NRA

In the aftermath of the horrible massacre in a Colorado movie theater, Bill Moyers has taped a video, excoriating the NRA as an "enabler" of death -- paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion."

Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. . . .  Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year. Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns than guns ... we have become so gun loving, so blasé about home-grown violence that in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined."

Bill Moyers doesn't have to fear the NRA's power.   Politicians are another story, including President Obama.   Not that he has any love for the NRA or necessarily any financial benefit from them.

But it is a sad political reality that it would be an enormous distraction to take them on in an election season.   So Obama has opted for the safer focus on enforcing existing gun control laws rather than trying to pas new ones before the election..

I don't admire that position, but I understand the practicality of it.   What if he took them on, and then unleashing their vengeance tipped the election balance -- and he lost?   Then we would regret it.   Better to get re-elected and then do something about it.

Ralph