Its actual purpose is to serve as a lobbying and propaganda organ for the firearms industry, and to promote government policies which favor that industry. Disguised as one, but actually serving the other, it is free to conduct itself in ways no other corporate shill would dare to, using patriotic and constitutional arguments, as well as fear and insecurity to fuel the killing, and the selling.

The key to understanding the modern firearms debate in the USA is that guns are durable items, if properly maintained they will last indefinitely, and can be passed down from owner to owner for generations. The legitimate uses for firearms are limited, and the market for them is saturated–most firearms do not become obsolete. My own pistol is fifty years old and represents a design that that has survived unchanged for over a century. And it still shoots straighter than I can.

There are also limited uses for guns as sporting or home-defense arms. After all, you can only shoot one gun at a time. Legitimate demand for firearms should be limited by population growth, but the industry has branched out into new designs and markets such as military-type weapons suitable for fighting wars and insurrections, or giving criminals a firepower advantage over the police. Firearms are indirectly marketed to criminals, who not only acquire them illegally, but now freely on the open market. Stolen weapons have to be replaced, and those who fancy themselves minutemen, vigilantes and superpatriots are desperate to join the resulting arms race which continues to spiral out of control.

The industry is a cash cow, and it supports an entire constellation of service industries, such as the gun porn press and the marketing and selling branches that support the gun manufacturers and the home carry licensing racket. Like health insurance and Big Pharma, it is simply too profitable to allow itself to be controlled, and the merchants of death will stop at nothing to keep it flourishing and growing.

Heaven help this nation if there ever is a breakdown in law and order and civil unrest erupts into the streets. It will not be an issue of citizens “defending their homes against intruders”. It will be about armed gangs and militias fighting it out in the streets while whatever remains of the police and military authorities will be dug in protecting the gated communities of the rich.

It won’t be a Zombie apocalypse, it will be more like the Lebanese Civil War.