Weekly Column by Loretta Redd

The NRA today announced that it was moving its headquarters to Pyongyang,  North Korea.  Tired of the fight in Washington, the lobbyists at the Institute for Legislative Action and the FriendsofNRA.org who “fundraise for the Future of Shooting Sports” have determined that Kim Jong Un in one leader who fully comprehends the importance of a well-armed society.

His beloved grandfather, Kim Jong Il, believed in “military first” and used his 17-year rule to spend generously on all sorts of weapons while ignoring the need for food and shelter for his own people.  Who cares if you’re starving in the dark, as long as you’re well protected by Dear Leader who has convinced you that the ‘imperialists’ are coming to take your guns and country at any moment.

According to news sources, “Guns and tanks are popular toys for children in the highly militarized society, and young North Koreans learn to fire guns when they are teenagers.  As young adults, they attend camps to learn military techniques.”

It’s an NRA dream come true!

No longer will the gun lobby have to waste money on NASCAR Sprint Cup sponsorships, where they give away two revolvers and a cowboy hat to the winners, and the fastest qualifier gets his very own shotgun.   No longer would they have to fund the Whittington Center, their non-profit shooting center, or the 10,000 annual shooting tournaments across the US.  No more “Friends of The NRA Dinner” events in Paso Robles as advertised on the Hoof ‘n Holler website, or fundraisers at the Santa Barbara Elks Lodge where the mostly ‘right to lifers’ celebrate the protection of the AR 15 with its 100 round clips.

Wayne LaPierre and board president, David Keene are salivating at the thought of exporting the mission of the NRA to a country where the military has 12,960,000 firearms, and the police have 245,000.  Talk about FREEDOM!

In truth, North Korea instituted internal gun control laws in 2009 as the senior Kim began to show signs of failing health.  For some silly reason the government thought the brain-washed masses might get a little prickly and want something more to eat than Kimchee and bullets.  In North Korea, guns are only allowed for “official duties,” while “institutions, groups, businesses,  and the public cannot lend, smuggle, produce or destroy weapons.”

North Korean civilians–a little stretched for cash–never had  that many weapons of their own.   In fact of 178 countries with privately owned guns, they rank 129th, with 0.6 guns per 100 people.  The United States, to no one’s surprise, ranks #1, with 88.8 guns per 100 people.

Makes you just puff up with pride, doesn’t it?

Founded in 1871, the NRA once had a reputation for safety and sport, but that was before it became more dedicated to the money of gun sales and the power of politics, and before our nation became an urban war zone.

Flush with income of over $220 million per year, this tax-exempt “social welfare organization” has 781 employees and 125,000 ‘volunteers.’   That’s a lot of volunteers, but if you’re pointing a gun at me, I might just be willing to volunteer as well.  The NRA boasts over four million members, but with North Korea’s 24 million people, just think of the expansion possibilities.

The NRA wasn’t always so politically radical.  An uprising began in 1977 at what is described as the Revolt of Cincinnati, when “a caucus of gun-right radicals took over the annual meeting,” changing the rules of the organization and instituting new leadership.  Seems these somewhat testy and more than slightly paranoid upstarts, led by Clifford Knox, were freaked out by the newly formed (1972) Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms having the authority to enforce gun laws.

The NRA was just about to move their headquarters from the nation’s capital to Colorado, where they’d just completed a $30 million recreation facility. That would remove them from what old Clifford saw as the ‘seat of power’ and he wasn’t about to let those Feds dictate the rules of gun ownership.

We have Knox to thank for hiring Wayne LaPierre as a lobbyist in 1978 with two aims: demonize both the media and the ATF.  Not only did the organization stay in DC, it was instrumental in getting the Firearm Owners Protection Act passed in 1986, which significantly eased restrictions on sales and prohibited the government from having a database of gun ownership.

LaPierre began to sound less like the Boy Scout image of the old NRA and more like the arm-twisting Skinheads that score members of Congress like marksman, putting a very clear target on their backs if they dare to propose any form of restriction on any type of weapon.

Having lost even ex-President George H W Bush as a member because of its radicalism, the current NRA leadership would be right at home in North Korea.  La Pierre could help draft less restrictive laws on gun ownership for young Kim, and he might inspire a new industry of Korean arms, like bullet-firing chop sticks and contests where the army’s frisbee-like military caps are used as skeet instead of clay pigeons.

It’s not like the United States and North Korea have nothing in common.  On April 2, 2013 the United Nations passed the Arms Trade Treaty, which “set standards for the transfer of any conventional weapon-from pistols to warplanes- and required nations to review all cross-border arm controls to ensure munitions would not be used in human rights abuses, terrorism and violations of humanitarian laws.”

Only four countries refused to sign the treaty after seven years of United Nations negotiations:

The Islamic Republic of Iran, The Syrian Arab Republic, the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea, and our very own United States of America.  Yes, it was defeated by congressional Republicans at the behest of the NRA, who believed it was a secret plot to control access to arms.

It’s like British comedian Eddie Izzard said the other day, ” ‘Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.’  But I think the gun helps.”