NRA owns Congress lock, stock and barrel

We got a one-day reprieve from the House, but it is expected to vote today to pass another bill on the gun lobby wish list that will make the National Rifle Assn. want to engage in a little celebratory gunfire. (Or pee its pants with excitement, whichever comes first.)

It's just one more link in a long chain of evidence -- as if anyone doubts it -- that the NRA owns Congress lock, stock and barrel.

The Gun Guys explain the issue and what's going on:

Three years ago, the Washington, DC area was terrorized by a pair of snipers who randomly tried to assassinate citizens. After they were brought to justice, their weapons were traced back to a weapons dealer who'd "lost" that weapon and almost 200 others to criminals. When the victims' families sued, they won $2.5 million.

The NRA moved quickly to protect their own. They decried people who had been victimized already, and tried to paint them as attacking a lagging gun industry. They blamed anti-gun groups for trying to hound the poor weapons industry into bankruptcy. And they called in their many favors in Congress, and made them create the bill the House of Representatives is about to vote on, which would give full lawsuit immunity to gun manufacturers and dealers, making it illegal to bring lawsuits against them for negligence with products that cause pain and death.

This is, frankly, unheard of. If your car crashes and you get injured because of a car company's faulty brakes, shouldn't the car company be held responsible? Not even the tobacco industry, whose product has been proven many times over to cause problems, enjoys such unqualified protection as the lawsuit immunity bill would provide. And the gun industry is far, far, far from failing. They bragged all this past summer about growing sales around the country-- any inference that this protection is necessary to keep them in business is a complete lie. Practically every media outlet and talking head out there has condemned this bill as NRA-conjured favoritism, and even legal experts, according to an editorial in today's New York Times, are "stunned that any industry could ever win such blanket immunity."

It seems impossible that any industry, any lobby could so blatantly and selfishly control Congress, but it's happening, and as soon as the House passes this bill and Bush signs it (as he's promised to), it will be law. A privately run, heavily funded lobby will have subverted the political system to their own agenda and needs. Wouldn't it be nice if laws were created to serve the people they're supposed to govern, instead of the gigantic and faceless industries that pay Congress enough for them? Sure it would. But that's not what's happening with this bill.