Griper Blade: Washington D.C., a Corporate Subsidiary

When the Senate rejected closing loopholes in background checks for gun purchases earlier this year, they definitely went against the will of the people. After all, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 92% of voters supported the expansion. Yet the Senate, in a not-even-close 54-46 vote, rejected the bill, preferring instead the soft-on-crime status quo. With public support for the bill so nearly universal, why would the Senate side with criminals and reject what is a very common sense measure?

The answer to that is simple. The National Rifle Association owns a lot of senators. And let's not pretend -- as the NRA themselves do -- that the gun lobby organization is nonpartisan. The NRA owns the GOP. Of the fifty-three Democratic senators serving at the time, forty-nine received no funding from the NRA. Only seven Republicans could say the same. And you have to assume that some of those seven aren't funded because they're shoe-ins. Why waste money on a candidate who's in no danger of losing? Just throw up a national ad statewide and call it a day. The senate went soft on crime because the Republican Party did. And the Republican Party made sure criminals and terrorists could still get their weapons through the gun show loophole because the NRA demanded it.

And so we now have a status quo embraced by Senate Republicans, but rejected by 92% of Americans. Clearly, something is broken here. But there's a fix and it's steadily gaining ground...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]