Well Jack, you begin by issuing MISSINFORMATION. The NRA has never advocated the the free accessibility of automatic weapons at any time. ATF has some very high hurdles for anyone who desires to own such weaponry, and rightly so. So here you have set up a straw man and proceed to demonstrate the NRA as an evil organization over something it neither does nor condones. So much for you lack of bias on the issue.

Cop-killer bullets. Now there is a term that is not loaded with bias. If you are referring to armor piercing bullets, I have to agree with you some. There is little need for such a round in the public sector. They can go through many walls and such and do represent an increased danger to the public. As far as I know, such rounds are not made available by those companies which produce ammunition for public sales. People can make their own and I am sure some do. Tell, Jack, how many people in law enforcement have been killed by such armor piercing rounds? I think the answer would be NONE. I could be wrong and if presented with the clear facts, I will so admit.

A lot of comparisons have been made about the danger of cars versus the danger of guns. They are both machines, both tools and both can be deadly to a number of people if misused or used maliciously. There are hundreds of millions of cars in the US and the way about half of them are operated it makes me wonder about the sanity of the DMVs about the country. About 50,000 people die annually on the nation's roadways. That's about how many died in the ten years that was the Viet Nam War. Hundreds of thousands more are injured or maimed in a single year. In ten years worth of travel more people die than in ALL the wars the US has ever been involved in. Where's the protests?

About 10,000 people die annually from gunshot. This includes those who die by police gunfire, suicide (over 5000), homicide and accidental shootings. Too many, I agree, and that is why gun education is one of the NRA's prime goals. Gun safety.

Now here is the difference between cars and guns. To drive is a privileged. You must be licensed and you must demonstrate a certain level of proficiency. Said license can be withdrawn from you for infractions, violations and criminality as well as incompetence. To be armed is your inalienable RIGHT. A person has the right to defend his life and the lives of others. In fact he has an obligation to defend the lives of others and by extension, he has the right to equip himself with the means, reasonable means to do just that. This is the right to keep and bear arms.

The NRA was the first to establish training centers for law enforcement and has erected "Shoot-No shoot" schools which teaches officers when and when not to use deadly force. They teach and promotes hunter safety and game management and they were instrumental in limits being placed on game to insure their continued numbers. They are involved in many such worthy endeavors.

Nowhere has the NRA ever promoted lawlessness or the abuse or misuse of firearms. To make modification to a firearm to either defeat a mechanism or change it so that is will fire automatically is against the law. If you do it, you are a criminal. The AK47 was developed as a sub (smaller that cal.50 ) machine gun for use in war. They are illegal. That weapon has a selector switch, also illegal, which allows the operator to toggle between semi-automatic fire ( one round per squeeze of the trigger) and fully automatic ( a continuous firing as long as the trigger is held down. The civilian version of this rifle does not have a selector switch. The inner mechanism can be easily defeated but, as I said before, it is illegal to do so. Most guns that hold more than one cartridge can be reworked to fire automatically. John Browning's first machine gun was nothing more than a Winchester lever-action rifle that had a tube placed on it to redirect the gasses to move a rod connected to the lever. Convertibility should not be sole the grounds for excluding a weapon from the general populace.

If you believe that people don't have a right to self-preservation then you probably see the NRA as something evil and for that I pity you. It's not guns you fear, it YOU that you fear.