If you read nothing else in the wake of the tragic events in Connecticut, you should check out the story that the socialist-liberal-fascists at Fortune have put together on who precisely it is that makes an unholy buck on murder in this country.
But I also think that it's time for our large nonprofit institutions to put some of their money where their mission is. Profit should be the primary goal of their investment offices, but not at the expense of their broader purposes. If a schoolteachers union or university endowment or nonprofit foundation truly cares about stopping the next mass killing, then they should not provide capital that produces the instruments of such destruction. For many gun enthusiasts, semi-automatic rifles like the .223 Bushmaster is about sport and individual liberty. For Freedom Group, they are about profit. If the company were unable to find private investors unless it changed internal policy — perhaps by only supplying such weaponry to police departments and military — then Freedom most likely would do so. Capital is, of course, the root of capitalism.
This could be the start of something real — a disinvestment campaign, modeled on the one aimed at companies doing business in South Africa and, later, at the tobacco industry, on the part of police, and fire, and school teachers' unions to remove their money from the marketing end of mass killing. A campaign that would redefine gun violence as a public-health crisis, as David Satcher tried to do years ago, and to redefine it on the balance sheet, where that would really count. This could be the start of holding the people who really make the money accountable for how they make it. You could close the NRA tomorrow, and they'd be another lobbying arm started up by armaments money within the hour. You could shoot Wayne LaPierre to the moon, and they'd be 100 other lobbyists lining up to take his place. Both LaPierre and the NRA serve not their members, but weapons manufacturers. (That's why all those polls about "rank and file" NRA members who support, say, background checks, are worthless. At its top, the organization no more answers to them than it does to the Brady Campaign.) The paranoia stoked by NRA fundraising — which, alas, seems to have worked its dark magic on Adam Lanza's mother — is not directed merely against sensible gun legislation. It's to sell more guns to the people who marinate themselves in that paranoia, so the people who make the guns can make even more money. That's the place you want to paint the bullseye.
