Speaking of bias in the media...

Letting the assault weapons ban expire shows what can happen when a crafty Congress and president sell out to the unscrupulous National Rifle Association.

Gotta love those adjectives. Crafty. Unscrupulous. I like another adjective that comes to mind here. Ad hominem.

The NRA, arms manufacturers, arms dealers and criminals win. The public loses. Now every criminal and mentally deranged person can have access, albeit illegally, to weapons matching the firepower of a well-armed policeman.

Gee, they could have access, albeit illegally, while the ban was in effect. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Not that having access to assault weapons matters a damn, since criminals didn't particularly favor them in the first place.

As strange as it may seem, the expiration of the assault weapons ban marks the beginning of the end for the National Rifle Association, but the NRA unwittingly lacks the ability to see its own demise. Nonetheless, it will happen.

The NRA was around before you were born, and it will be around once you pass away.

Eventually, someone with an assault weapon ? as before the ban ? will assassinate all the customers in a fast food store or kill a dozen or more workers in a manufacturing plant, all with a gun that doesn't need reloading. When this happens, as it did in Australia, Britain and California, there will be an uprising unlike any we have ever seen demanding common-sense gun control laws we would have except for paranoia in the National Rifle Association.

Maybe this will happen. Maybe it will be a member of the Million Misguided Mommies who does it.

The laws enacted will require the registration of all gun owners, the registration of all guns owned, and limit the number of guns a person may buy in a year. Mention these three laws, and any NRA member worth his shooter's cap will have a panic attack.

We call this "wishful thinking" in polite society. In Texas, we call it bullshit.

The expiration of the assault weapons ban should be a wake-up call to expose the warped thinking and mendacious actions of the NRA. We don't have to wait for a mass murder.

That's right, you can commit one to hurry things along!

A good place to begin is by showing that the NRA's "patriotic" defense of the Second Amendment is nothing more than hogwash. It uses the Second Amendment as a smokescreen to defend its irrational and illogical proposals under the pretext that legality equals sanity.

And your reasoning for describing respecting the self-defense rights of Americans, such rights being Constitutionally protected, is... what exactly? Oh, you have none? It suffices to call them "irrational" and "illogical" without demonstrating that? I see.

Accordingly, we must hold the NRA responsible for its irrational acts and pass sensible gun control laws, ideally before a massacre occurs. The NRA is a seriously flawed organization that will lose its power when sufficiently exposed for what it is, an affliction on society.

Would this paper have published this editorial have still published it if all references to the NRA and gun owners had been replaced by references to "blacks"?