NRA MEMBERS DRIVEN BY INSTINCT NOT LOGIC

The Nation Rifle Association (NRA) has added 100,000 members since the tragic shooting of six and seven year old children. It defines logic. One of the themes of my blog posts is that when something happens that seems so illogical it may relate to something innate. I find this surge in NRA membership such an instance. If 100,000 joined the NRA, it probably means many more were thinking of doing the same thing. The ostensible reason is fear that the “government” will be coming for their guns. This has been fed by such nonsense as the now dead Carlton Hesston’s declaration, made while defiantly hold aloof a rife, that if they were to take his guns it would be from “his cold dead hands”. He was acting the part of the macho man, the Marlborough cowboy, the rugged individualist among other idols of conservatives. Most of us accept the idea that the majority of people who think this way are conservatives. I have posted a number of blogs before about how liberals are altruistic and conservative are selfish or greedy—I do not intend either term to be pejorative. Therefore, my task is to tie this belief to the idea that conservatism, gun ownership, and greed are innately related to one another and not related to helping others.

I believe greed was fundamental to survival of the fittest. This should be obvious. The living organism, including man, who gets the most out of the environment in the time of scarcity, is the one that will survive. This implies competition. Our society and then our culture has evolved from such innate things as speed, agility, and physical and mental strength to artificial forms of strength such as sharp rocks, spears, bows and arrows, guns, and on to ridiculously stronger and stronger things such as battle ships and atomic bombs. This means that people who treasure the military the most, the ones who hold high their guns and defy anyone to take them, are the greedy; the conservatives. Our humanization is taking us in another direction; it is taking us toward altruism, sharing through empathy, which is a feeling or sense not found in bestial conservatives until they realized that they had family with which to share the spoils of their greed. Humanization is extending our feeling of family to all human beings, even six and seven year old children in a schoolroom learning how to read. Those little bloody bullet-riddled bodies should remind 100,000 new NRA members there are more important things than your bestial macho instinct of greed, which is illogically driving you to do what you do and to think the way you think. However, I realize that because it is innate, it is like talking about stopping to smoke to a nicotine addict.