Good read here about the delusional aspect of the gun movement, and even how potentially dangerous some of its followers could be. (And I'm not talking about average gun owners here. Although if you read comments on the topic across the Internet it would sure seem like there aren't many sane gun owners out there.)
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/16/opinion/waldman-gun … ?hpt=hp_t2
Personally, I do not care what the NRA has to say... The whole damned organization is insane to the extreme. What I do care about is the fact that others - including our legislators - pay attention to such ilk. That does not say much for our political system.
We need a rescue plan for our political system. Such a plan must include restricting lobbyists with access to legislators, disguising contributions to political campaigs in ways that make it impossible to ferret out "bought off" legislators, and so forth. We can do better. It was the vision of the Founding Fathers that no Army of Lobbyists as currently exists would have so much influence and power as to compromise the political will of The People.
Actually, I've known a lot of conservatives who are very reasonable people who are mostly conservative because of fiscal issues. The hard-core nuts are not representative of those conservatives. They also need to join the effort to reel the GOP back in from its lunatic fringes. The nuts are giving conservatism a bad name.
Besides the delusion that they are the patriots standing against tyranny (Obama in current belief), another common fantasy is that a person with a gun would take down any bad guy. Maybe that would be true if the bad guy had a handgun, but in the case of a mass shooter with an AR-15, it's just a crazy fantasy. Even most serious (not nuts) gun people, for example, conceded that there would have been little that could have been done in the Aurora movie theater rampage, even if someone in the audience had a gun. It was dark, the gunman was crazy, the situation was totally confused, and there was a hail of bullets. A person with a gun in the audience would have been more likely to shoot another audience member than the gunman.
To be clear, most gun owners aren't stockpiling canned goods and assault rifles in preparation for some kind of societal breakdown that will give them permission to act out the violent fantasies they've been nurturing for years. But many would say that their "right" to own any and every kind of firearm they please is the only thing that guarantees that tyranny won't come to the United States.
Well, guess what: They're wrong. In today's world, most tyrants aren't overthrown by an armed populace. Nonviolent revolutions can result in a quick transition to democracy, while violent insurrections often result in long and bloody civil wars.
And here in America, it isn't 1776, and it won't ever be again.