I haven't watched the YouTube videos yet but I have the links on a digital post-it. Got a long weekend coming up and I'll have more time.

My "Koolaid Drinkers" remark stems from the increasing radicalization it's undergone in the last fifty to sixty years. For about a century it was a perfectly respectable marksmanship organization until America suffered a massive crime spike in the '60s and '70s and there was a 'revolt' within the NRA in 1977. Since then it's turned hyper-aggressive, has contributed greatly to the political divide (although hardly the only one), traffics in conspiracy theories ("the liberals will take all your guns!"), fanatically supports an overly-broad, extremist view of the Second Amendment that the Founding Fathers did NOT have in mind when their primary concern was protecting themselves against the British Army, and is the primary force behind why we have 'assault weapons' on our streets, in the hands of nutbags, and you're doing that thing the NRA True Believers do to discredit and distract critics by nitpicking over exact vocabulary, and especially the term 'assault weapons'. It's a perfectly valid term to describe weapons used for mass assault.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-nras-true-believers-converted-a-marksmanship-group-into-a-mighty-gun-lobby/2013/01/12/51c62288-59b9-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html

Since it won't listen to reason and sounds like a pack of crazies, I really don't care what they think of us and reject the notion that us critics have to become experts on the different types of guns in order to be taken seriously. Wayne LaPierre did *nothing* to improve the NRA image as a bunch of assault weapon-packing whackos,

It's because of the NRA that so many sane gun laws have been repealed, and any old idiot can get one. I remember thirty years ago in Connecticut when a co-worker told some of us that one of the guys who worked in a different department wanted him to write a letter of recommendation for him in order to get a gun, it was part of the process at the time (not sure if it was state or federal law or what). He was on the fence about it because he wasn't sure about the guy's mental state. You don't have that today. "Hi, my name is Salvador Ramos, I just turned 18, and I want to buy a gun." Sure, no problem. You'd think a rational, responsible gun lobby would want to keep guns out of the hands of the violent nutbags like Ramos who want guns but no....that would 'abrogate' their 2A rights.

The NRA latches on to every tiny minority idiot who says we should 'ban all guns' and makes out like *everyone* on the left feels that way (I haven't met one yet, but I can't say they don't exist). Reminds me of Bush's 'welfare queen' - the one black woman who had really cleverly figured out a way to game the welfare system and live well, and he talked about her as though *many* people on welfare were the cheats she was.

I call many of the NRA's supporters 'Koolaid Drinkers' because ye shall know them by their actions, not their words. They *say* they're responsible gun owners and maybe they are; but they sure do seem to be running scared these days, and I wonder if the spotlight shined on the 'violent history' connection has anything to do with it. When the NRA starts supporting rational, sane gun laws - the same ones that just about every other 'civilized' country has with remarkably fewer gun homicides of all types - I'll rethink my position on "Koolaid drinkers".

But y'all are going to have to *earn* our respect, and stop playing games with words.