Well back in eighteen hundred seventy one, when the Civil War was good and done, couple a Union generals, Burnside was one, were still kinda bummed about something
You see it was nice and all to win the war but, truth was their marksmen had been pretty horrible, using a gun called a smoothbore and all of em, weren’t known to be too efficient, kinda lacking in precision, definitely an issue that needed fixing

In fact their accuracy was so pathetic, about one in a thousand was the number they said that a shot that was fired actually made someone dead it was no way to run a real country, so
To try to save America from humiliation and keep up with the rest of the developed nations, they formed the national rifle association, at the time under the actual assumption, it would be a sports club, for hunting, and gun instruction, and not for nothing but back then they even wanted control of em

See they viewed the right from which it was based, in the frontier survival of the early days when a man had to protect in wide open space, a duty not to be played with or wasted

Til the 70s they kept it true to their mission, of sport, and skill, and history, and tradition, til two guys named Carter and Knox had a vision to do away with all of that business
Any control of a gun was too much, a slippery slope they thought, maybe the cusp of a full confiscation of guns, so they mustn’t put any rules up to disrupt what their forefathers trusted they’d understand justly, though it had been roughly a hundred year cycle, since them old pump rifles

Plus they’d be damned if they’d ever submit, to a hypothetical tyrannical government
After all they didn’t trust the people running it, so they decided to give em all money
To lobby against legislation intended for ex-cons or mentally unstable men or really anyone having rules they’d need to bend to get whatever weapon that they wanted, they couldn’t be stunted, didn’t matter if they hunted, or how many rounds per minute the gun did, it’s all green in the middle sonny

And then came old Moses himself, Charlton Heston, and a guy named LaPierre as the new vice president, and the politicking got even more aggressive, after all had to protect their investment
Lotta cash to be made in patriotism, so they swapped out militia with the word individual, and preached it was every man’s god given will to be vigilant to the red, white, and blue
Never mind if there’s maybe a loose cannon or two, some loner decides that what he ought to do, is take it all out on some folks wth his shiny and new, unregulated AR-15, a fine machine, so shiny and clean

Cause when the news breaks, they’ll offer a couple, thoughts and prayers, hope for some sales to double, blame it on TV, the liberal judges, and video games if they gotta
Cuz now’s not the time to get soft after all, with so many enemies great and small, you better be quick on the draw, as a matter of fact buy em up all if you wanna, could be coming for your mama, Barack Hussein Obama

So let me just say, shooting’s fun, I can dig it, but so’s driving fast, that’s why there’s a speed limit, cuz otherwise what’s to stop someone from giving it gas while they go through a school zone

And speaking of school’s I’d prefer if I knew that my daughters could go there without bullet proofing their backpacks, that they could sit back in the cafeteria and snack real relaxed like, without worrying about the attack of the incel with the holograph sight

And one other thing that I just can’t grapple with, is why we need a 1.2 gun per capita, that’s more than one gun for every single inhabitant, like all 300 million people, more than one gun for each of em, I’m no mathematician but that kinda division seems unreasonable

Cause all that it takes is a couple loose screws and healthy dose of some 24/7 cable news, and a regular old case of the Monday blues, and boom, there goes the neighborhood
And thanks to guys like LaPierre and Knox, the sports club don’t care about how good a shot you are, or if there might be a red flag to spot to think maybe you just might not need em, what’s a school kid or two between em, price of freedom

I can respect that you may have a family you wanna protect if things every got gnarly and I support that fully and whole heartedly, but why the need for the whole army

Because here we are in year two thousand and twenty, and the gov ‘postrophe t’s acting funny, with secret police in the streets and not one a ya seems to be reaching for your piece
I guess all that don’t tread on me stuff and such, is just like a talking point you can use as a crutch to not have to say that you just love guns so much, and if that’s the case I get it trust me, it ain’t enough to justify upwards of hundreds of thousands of deaths every year in this country

And how about the constitutional scholars, who live and die by the words of our forefathers but when the time actually comes can’t be bothered, if peaceful protesters get shot up, so long as they’re not us, the real patriotic desperados, sitting on our cold dead hands

I guess that my point, to keep a short story long, is that somewhere, the old NRA got it wrong, and the original goal to keep our soldiers strong and prepared just went out of the window
To cash in and become a lobbying arm, for more and more guns, no matter the harm, but man we’re a long way from back at the farm so we may need to rethink the system, ain’t saying I got the wisdom, just saying, if the mark was a deer for which they thought they needed some real military precision, I think they missed it
The second amendment is only one sentence so the word regulated is hard to forget
But I guess LaPierre, and old Moses C. Heston, and Oliver North, and the whole damn rest of em, couldn’t care less if you pass any tests or have crimes to confess, they consider it best to just let em possess, and just the build the war chest, make em all guess that they’re being the best they can be to suppress the hypothetical, tyrannical, government of U, S, of A