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sc94597 on 10 November 2017
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SpokenTruth said:

Dear Republicans. When is the right time to start talking about gun control and mental health coverage? Can we make it early next week? If we wait too long, we'll have another shooting and we'll have to start your "It's too soon to talk about it" clock all over again.

Not a Republican here, but I think the center-"left" is pretty lazy. Gun-rights advocates put their time and votes where their mouths are. They support their organizations through grassroots efforts which aim to protect their rights through the concentration of democratic power at the margins. That is why Republicans don't want to speak a lick of gun control. The NRA isn't scary because it has money (there are many richer moneyed interests donating to Republicans; the NRA pays pebbles in comparison), they are scary because their report card tells Republican and Independent voters whom and whom not to vote for in the next primary and maybe general elections. Right now the gun-control advocates -who are supposedly leftists, but are really just class-warring urban bourgeoisie hoping to deprive the non-urban proletariat of their means of defense like they've done to the urban proleteriat in cities where crime-rates explode, depend on astroturf funding from plutocrats like Michael Bloomberg to do anything, and then they moralize and blame when the money donated from said plutocrats does nothing to push forward their cause.

The reason why gun rights advocates (and not all of us are Republicans) say "this is not the right time" is because people are not thinking rationally immediately after a sensationalized mass-shooting and are looking for easy answers to complex social phenomena, and this is true all over the political spectrum. 

It also doesn't help that often when there is consensus on a gun-control position (such as more powerful and expansive background checks) the gun-control side poisons the legislation with something they know would not be accepted by gun-rights advocates and even those who are for gun-control .