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Nothing smokes out the wingnut crazy quite like suggesting, as Bob Costas did the other day, that it might be a wee bit too easy to get a hold on the all the guns floating around this country. Take Lars Larson on Fox News.

LARSON: Well, I don't say this lightly Megyn, but Bob Costas, based on the standards of our society today and the standards of our industry...deserves to be fired for these remarks. He's done the equivalent of suggesting that 300M Americans be stripped of a right so important that the Founders of our country put it in the Constitution.

Costas did nothing of the sort. Also, I love it when right-wing propagandists talk about their "standards" on Fox News. Snort.

LARSON: If he had suggested stripping Civil Rights from any other group large or small in this country, for instance, Megyn, if today you said black Americans shouldn't be able to vote, you'd probably either be disciplined or fired tomorrow or later on this afternoon.

Follow that? Somehow "our gun culture is destructive" became "blacks shouldn't be able to vote."

Anyway, there's plenty more crazy in this segment. Love when they compare Costas' criticism of our gun culture to Hank Williams Jr.'s "Obama's like Hitler!" remarks.

Charming.

Of course, this makes Judge Clevert into one of those "activist" judges the wingnuts are always yelling about (i.e. any judge who doesn't rule the way they think he or she should), but it's certainly refreshing to see a judge enforcing a union contract as negotiated. From the National Labor Relations Board:

A federal judge has ordered a Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to restore full-time status and health insurance to employees whose hours were reduced to part-time without bargaining with their union, and to refrain from making such unilateral changes in the future.

At the request of the National Labor Relations Board, Chief Judge C.N. Clevert, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin also ordered the supermarket to immediately offer reinstatement to four employees who resigned after their hours were reduced. The temporary injunction will continue until the underlying case is resolved by the NLRB.

According to a complaint issued by the NLRB Regional Office in Milwaukee, supermarket managers reduced the hours of 19 employees without notice, citing the impending opening of a non-union competitor nearby. The move to part-time status also resulted in the loss of health insurance.

Supermarket employees are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 1473. At the time of the reduction of hours, Piggly Wiggly managers berated union officials for not helping the employees in letters that were posted on the bulletin board. Judge Clevert noted “the unilateral reductions, open hostility to the Union, efforts to undermine the Union’s credibility” in issuing the injunction, which restores the Union’s bargaining position and requires that future changes to employee status be negotiated with the union.

There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.

In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.

But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).

This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.

In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as "jack-booted thugs". This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership.

They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he "had blood on his hands" - all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows - which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked.

Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to "strengthen existing gun laws" after each new tragedy).

In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a "jihadist" in America who was... "a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open..." was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked.

Emerson Begolly, the "jihadist" in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that "someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk". Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands.

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