In Better Gun-Related News...

[Content Note: Guns; violence; ableism.]

FMF News: Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly Launch Anti-Gun PAC.

In an op-ed in USA Today, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly announced that they have launched a Political Action Committee to challenge the dominance of gun-rights lobbyists in Washington, DC, on the two year anniversary of the shooting in Tuscon, Arizona, that left six dead and severely wounded the Congresswoman.

Giffords and Kelly criticized the National Rifle Association's response to the Sandy Hook Massacre, saying "Special interests purporting to represent gun owners but really advancing the interests of an ideological fringe have used big money and influence to cow Congress into submission. ... Rather than conducting a dialogue, they threaten those who divert from their orthodoxy with political extinction."

The PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, will attempt to start national discussion about pro-active and realistic gun control as well as raise funds to rival the clout the National Rifle Association has in Congress. "With Americans for Responsible Solutions engaging millions of people about ways to reduce gun violence and funding political activity nationwide, legislators will no longer have reason to fear the gun lobby," the couple said.

Let it be so.

This is a real teaspoon vs. dumptruck operation right now. (Donate here, if you are able and so inclined.) I hope they are successful, and I hope that they deemphasize the whole "keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill" rhetoric along the way, for reasons I have already detailed.

It isn't that I don't understand the reflexive support of the eminently reasonable-sounding idea that dangerously, violently mentally ill people shouldn't be armed. It's just that I can't ignore all the Various Stuff (e.g.) which makes that eminently reasonable-sounding idea not a very realistic or effective or just idea in practice.