The Taliban and the NRA

Bowe Bergdahl - Ballet Dancer

For five years the Taliban kept their American prisoner alive.  However petulantly conservatives call for the man's head as a traitor, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl couldn't have been of much help to the Afghans, given the fact that he was a lowly private in the Army at the time of his capture and a ballet dancer in real life.  During the period of his captivity, casualties mounted on both sides.  One of his captor's sons was killed by a CIA missile drone strike. That man and those around him couldn't have felt kindly towards the American prisoner. On two occasions when the prisoner tried to escape, he was tortured and locked in a cage.  And yet, at least by their standards, the Taliban believed they were taking adequate care of their prisoner, following the dictates of the Geneva Convention, finding fresh fruit for the American when all they had to eat was dried goat's meat.

Now let's turn to the National Rifle Association.  That organization has seen to it that assault rifles, other lethal weapons and limitless ammunition would be sold to every raving lunatic, who entered an American gun store.   The NRA has also made sure that Congress would not fund any research on gun violence.  After the shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, columnist Mike Lupica wrote:

 We see once again with more dead students, this time at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that gun violence in America is an epidemic. This is a fact of life seen everywhere except the National Rifle Association, the most dangerous lobby in this country or any country, and by the elected officials who regularly pimp themselves out to it.

We are talking here about all those in the Senate and in the Congress who represent gun companies even more fiercely than they do their states or their districts, those who hide behind the Second Amendment, something conceived and written for a world of muskets, the way cockroaches hide in similar dark places.

These are people who do not only fight what they call “gun grabbers.” They also fight any legitimate research into the whole complicated subject of gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is only allowed to spend around $100,000 a year because the NRA and its tame politicians act as if education is some kind of threat to our basic freedoms, instead of a way to understand the connection between the insane number of guns in this country and the people who keep dying as a result of them.

The United States government has spent trillions of dollars to get rid of the Taliban.  In the past five years we can attribute 0 attacks to the Taliban on American soil.   But at least 200  mass killings -- defined by the FBI as four or more victims, not including the killer -- have occurred across the U.S. at the rate of about one every two weeks since 2006.

Who knows? Maybe the Afghans are secretly funding the NRA to make sure that we Americans kill our own selves off.