RIP, “Cowboy Culture”.

It’s Way Past Time for the Lone American Male with a Gun to Ride Off Into the Sunset.

The nauseating spectacle of a culture destroying itself to feed the greed of a particular industry, in this case, the unholy American alliance of gun manufacturers, their spokespersons at the NRA, and their toadies in the Republican party, has now become a full-fledged feature of daily American life. No other country even comes close to suffering this phenomenon as we do in America, though all deal with similar (and in some cases higher) levels of mental illness, and have equal or greater social and political challenges. Despite the NRA’s bizarre and increasingly pathetic efforts at truth-twisting, we all know that the bottom-line reason for this uniquely US-American phenomenon is guns. When we had a federal ban on assault weapons, mass deaths from guns virtually collapsed. When Republicans failed to reinstate the ban after it expired, mass shooting deaths skyrocketed again, and now continue to climb. Sooner or later the ability for individual citizens to obtain weapons of war will be regulated. Sooner or later, the NRA will be treated as the domestic terrorist organization it is. Sooner or later, the gun industry will be held accountable for the death and destruction it profits from. We will either have a country that values the rights of its citizens to survive over the rights of individual gun owners to destroy those lives, or we will have no country at all. We all now know the indisputable bottom-line to solving this problem: seriously regulate the guns. There is no viable argument…