CT Post: Sen. Chris Murphy Rips into Gun-Rights Movement
Actually, Senator Murphy, the belief in gun rights stretches back to at least the founding of the country…
Via CT Post:
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy on Thursday took a deep dive into the interwoven worlds of the gun-rights movement and gunmakers, saying anti-government “neo-anarchist’’ Republicans are aligned with a firearms industry desperate to sell more guns to a shrinking customer base.
In a speech at the National Press Club before an audience including Mark Barden, founder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise, Murphy said hostility to government has become a right-wing standard, especially since the election of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, in 2008.
Economic uncertainty, the need for scapegoats, government bashing in the media, and the belief that gun rights are “God given’’ — all of it merged into what Murphy termed “the coin of the realm” for conservative Republicans in general and gun-rights supporters in particular.
“In an era where anti-government positioning is a hallmark of the modern right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that increasingly Republicans are absolutist in their views on the right of citizens to own guns,” Murphy said. “They want to preserve the right of revolution as a means of showing how much they truly hate the current government, administered by President Barack Obama.”
The gun industry, which already markets guns based on the need for self-defense at home, was only too happy to oblige, Murphy said.
“Only one-third of Americans today are buying guns, as opposed to half of Americans 30 years ago, meaning that the industry is reliant on a smaller number of gun owners buying large caches of expensive weapons like the AR-15,” he said. “The number of buyers has shrunk, so the simple solution, the industry realized, is to just sell more weapons to this smaller-sized market.”
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