By Joseph Batory

The United States makes up just over 4 percent of the global population, but its citizens own more than 40 percent of the world’s guns.

The regular occurrences of mass killings and other homicides  by guns in our nation bring out the usual array of  political hypocrites offering empty “thoughts and prayers,” but nothing of any substance to correct this sad state of life in America.

And there is  not likely to be any future political initiatives to curtail this American epidemic of killing. Why? Because the gun control issue driven first and foremost by “money” rather than the common good of Americans.

The annual revenues for the gun and ammunition manufacturing and sales industry are in the multi-billions. And  the gun industry will do anything to sustain itself. The National Rifle Association (NRA), heavily subsidized by gun businesses and far-right-leaning individuals and organizations, is the master of propaganda.  The NRA has created an ongoing fantasy about “guns being symbolic of American freedom” and “gun availability being in no way related to gun violence.”  And such absurd arguments have been incredibly successful for many years.

Added to this are millions of  NRA dollars (thankfully limited by campaign limits) distributed to individual members of Congress each year. But it is primarily the NRA’s questionable messaging that has built the base of true believer voters and keep politicians in line (mostly Republican).

In summary, the NRA emergence as a reputable interpreter of the US Constitution is preposterous. Added to this,  a cowardly and  politically influenced Supreme Court has lost its way in protecting America’s citizenry, helping  the NRA to avoid gun restrictions utilizing an absurd interpretation of the antiquated Second Amendment written about muskets and militias more than 200 years ago.

The NRA mythology is that the Framers of the Constitution would today endorse the possession of semi-automatic assault rifles and other military weapons for one and all as some fulfillment of a “sacred” Second Amendment. But this NRA position is little more than a “legacy of blood, political corruption and corporate greed,” one that certainly has our Founding Fathers spinning angrily in their graves. The Constitution of the United States was never meant to protect mass murders (like those at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 people, including 20 children, were slaughtered in five minutes with a semi-automatic rifle) and the highest gun homicide rate in the world.

In 1991, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a lifelong conservative, called the NRA’s Gun Control interpretation of the Second Amendment “one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat, fraud – on the American public … that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

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Joseph Batory is the author of three books and has been widely published on history, politics, and education.