Last Call For Gunmerica TV

And finally today, while we're talking about how the left completely lost the gun control argument, let's not forget the real reason is because the NRA is another corporate lobby and represents an industry that is doing the best it has ever done.

As the fractious debate over American gun laws continues, two people in California are preparing to launch the country’s first all-gun home shopping television channel.

Created by Doug Bornstein and Valerie Castle—both of whom previously worked for home shopping networks—the new channel, named GunTV, is scheduled to launch on January 20, during the gun industry’s annual multi-day SHOT Show in Las Vegas. It will go live via national satellite and cable TV providers and eventually air 24 hours a day.

Neither founder was able to provide comment in time for publication.

GunTV, also known as GTV Live Shopping, will broadcast gun-related programming and sell firearms, ammunition and accessories. "The ease and convenience of purchasing firearms will be as simple as consumers calling a toll-free number and placing their order," GunTV says in a promotional video. The channel will also air safety, training and instructional content every hour, according to its website, as well as commercials from manufacturers.

Here’s how the purchasing process works: The channel will electronically deliver orders to Sports South, one of the largest distributors of sporting goods in the U.S. The distributor will then ship the firearms to a local gun store, where a viewer can pick it up, according to The Desert Sun, a newspaper in Palm Springs, California. To comply with gun regulations, customers likely will have to pass background checks before the federally licensed dealers sell them firearms. Federal law requires background checks at licensed dealers, so consumers can purchase guns without checks online and at firearm shows.

Sports South, which is based in Louisiana, will provide GunTV customers with access to more than 475 product lines and outdoor sporting goods.

The United States has an average of 89 firearms for every 100 residents, according to a promotional video from GunTV.

Initially, the channel will air six hours of daily programming, mostly shopping, starting at 1 a.m., seven nights a week. The founders hope to expand it to a 24/7 lineup during 2016, The Desert Sun reported.

The paranoid business has never been better.  GunTV: It's the most American thing imaginable!

The Gunmerican Epidemic

The NY Times, for the first time in 95 years, has put the paper's editorial board opinion on the paper's front page, blasting the country's deadly gun fetish and the people who enable it.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

As I said, not messing around.  It's something that has needed to be said by a major American media outlet for a very long time, and yet as we approach 2016, nothing will have changed.  It will most likely not change in my lifetime, not unless the voting pattern and turnout of tens of millions of Americans change.

And our system is designed to make sure that will never happen.

If Newtown, if Aurora, if Charleston, if now Colorado Springs and San Bernardino don't motivate voters to throw out the NRA lobby, then nothing will.

It is screaming into the abyss, and the abyss will kill 30-35,000 every year and more and we will call it the price of freedom, the blood cost that must water the Tree of Liberty.  It was nice of the editorial board to try.  You're more likely to see this Congress pass laws stripping the paper of its editorial power than you are ridding the country of these weapons of war and death.

Gunmerica indeed.

This will be the first and only time that this blog says this, probably in 95 years, but Jonah Goldberg's conclusion is correct:

Similarly, while very, very, very few people outside the Times’ offices — and media nerds like me — could care less about what is essentially a P.R. gimmick, the Times thinks this is a Very Big Deal. For the staid grey lady this amounts to shouting “Unleash the Kraken!” It shows you how desperate and frustrated the editors — and liberals generally — are with the fact that this country doesn’t agree with them on guns. It also shows that the “national conversation” most Americans want has more to do with Islamist terrorism and less to do with the alleged “gun show loophole.” This alone doesn’t make The Times’ views or their arguments illegitimate or invalid. But it does illustrate how unpersuasive they are to much of the public.

The same can be said for the disgustingly hypocritical new fad of calling Wayne LaPierre a “terrorist.” This from the same crowd who insisted Sarah Palin had blood on her hands because of some cross-hairs on a congressional district map and that Michelle Bachmann should be put in the dock for her “eliminationist rhetoric.” I have no problem with criticizing LaPierre, but the double standard is just so appalling. I mean, seriously, to Hell with these people.

What’s true for lawyers is also true for newspapers: When you’re shouting and pounding the table, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.

And in fact the gun control argument in this country has been lost.  It was never going to be won without blood. This applies to either side, and one side is proudly willing to accept tens of thousands of casualties in order to win. Our side has accepted the butcher's bill by default.

It's over, folks.  Gunmericans have won.  And it's been that way for decades.

All I Want For Christmas Is Pew (Pew Pew)

Here in America we don't stigmatize our mentally ill, we elect them to state legislatures.

'Tis the season — even for firearms. 

For Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore's (R) 2015 family Christmas card, which she posted on Facebook on Monday, her family was each outfitted with a gun. If it wasn't immediately obvious, Fiore is a staunch defender of Second Amendment rights.

"It's up to Americans to protect America. We're just your ordinary American family. -With love & liberty, Michele," her message read. Here's the card:

You remember Michele Fiore, right?  The nice Republican lady who backed Cliven Bundy against the federal government and tore poor Chris Hayes a new asshole on national TV, and later went to speak at a rally for the nice people who want to take up armed resistance against America?

Yeah, that Michele Fiore.  Now pictured with her kids holding weapons designed to kill.

As a Christmas card. Jesus would approve, right?

But this is acceptable in America, and there are people who will choose to use weapons like those above to make sure that everyone else is terrorized into accepting it as normal.