Side story on the recent gun spree

[J Wolfsberger]

It does even so after an obvious record of fear mongering, hypocrisy, inconsistency and distortions.

On this I agree with you. Despite all of the things you cite coming in a never ending stream from Democrats and other Leftists, the NRA is still a very widely respected organization. Incidentally, part of your confusion is due to the fact that many more millions of people look to the NRA to protect their rights than actually join. (Of which, last I heard, they were getting close to 5 million members [1 million new in the past couple of months]. Hats off to Obama for running such a successful membership drive on their behalf.)

A society working well would not have paid much attention to the NRA leadership and would instead have moved on with overwhelmingly popular measures such as universal background checks a long time ago.

I realize that growing up in the old DDR makes it difficult to understand what a lot of terms mean. A "society working well" does, in fact, pay a lot of attention to the leadership of organizations that represent sizable portions of its membership. What I think confused you is the hard Left definition of "society" as "the properly indoctrinated Leftists" who make noise out of all proportion to their membership in that society.

It's dysfunctional that dominates, not some supposedly unique "freedom" to be proud of.

Likewise with your use of the term "dysfunction." It does NOT mean "refuses to rubber stamp the majority opinion." What dominates in the U.S. is a dynamic tension between different points of view. That does, indeed, make it very difficult for one side to impose its will on the other. Again, given that you grew up in the DDR it's understandable you'd be confused about this.

Incidentally, I read one of those constitutions you recommended as a modern, responsible constitution. They "granted" the citizens the "right" to food, clothing shelter, jobs, health care, etc. (I suspect a right to free puppies was in there somewhere, but I didn't look.) They also "granted" government the "right" to levy taxes. I was underwhelmed.

I think you need to work on understanding the distinction among the concepts of "right," "privilege" and "desires." One thing you could try that might help along those lines would be to put some effort into understanding the 2000+ years of philosophical and theological reasoning that underpins the U.S. Constitution (with particular attention to Plato, Cicero, St. Thomas, Spinoza, and a whole library of English and French philosophers). Another would be to understand why that "modern" constitution looks, to this U.S. citizen, to lie somewhere between infantile and childish.