I read the other day about King County’s new legislation restricting the ownership of dangerous dogs. It was introduced and promoted by a councilmember after a 72-year old Sea-Tac woman was badly injured by two pit bulls last fall.

And that is one of the roles of our elected officials – respond to public health threats with appropriate legislation.

Also in the news recently was the murder of doctor George Tiller in Wichita, an abortion provider who was gunned down in his church by an anti-abortion activist with a history of mental illness.

Since the woman was attacked by the pit bulls in September, there have been more than 100 gun-related deaths in King County, and somewhere upward of 25,000 across the country. Talk about a public health crisis.

Yet politicians everywhere continue to shy away from legislation restricting ownership of firearms.

It is no secret that this is due to the enormous political power wielded by the National Rifle Association, an organization funded and supported by weapons manufacturers.

The NRA’s well-financed and fervent lobbying continues to guarantee liberal access to not just sporting rifles, but semi-automatic assault rifles and handguns, which are made regularly available to children, felons, and people with mental illnesses.

In 1975, then NRA leader Harlon Carter was asked by congress which he felt was preferable — having a national means of checking the backgrounds of all gun buyers, or permitting felons, drug addicts and the mentally ill to acquire guns. He said he preferred the later, stating that the possession of weapons by the unbalanced and dangerous was “the price we pay for freedom.”

It is a price that the American people have been paying repeatedly, tragically, ever since.

The pro-gun lobby has so dominated legislative endeavors to regulate firearm sales that in 1992, a study by the Violence Policy Centre found that there were more gun dealers in America than petrol stations. Around this time licensing of firearms dealers had become so lax that two dogs were licensed as gun dealers by the ATF.

With so much money to be made from promoting paranoia and lawlessness, the NRA works very hard to maintain sales of of semi-automatic pistols like the MAC-10 and TEC 9, designed for use against human targets, and often fitted with telescopic stocks, heat dispersing shrouds, pistol grips, grenade launchers, flash suppressors and bayonet fittings.

In the 1980’s, then Congressman Dick Cheney, supported by the NRA, used the Second Amendment as justification for opposing legislation restricting the sale of armor-piercing bullets, also supporting the development of plastic handguns that would evade metal detectors.

In recent years the NRA has successfully lobbied to ensure the availability to citizens of specialised human killing machines such as ‘The Ultimate Sniper Rifle’ – a .50 Calibre rifle with a 1000 yard range. Its bullets can pierce multiple layers of metal.

In 1995, the gun lobby persuaded the Supreme Court to rule that Congress had exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce when it made possession of a firearm on school property a federal crime as part of the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

In 1997 the NRA, on behalf of gun manufacturers, successfully argued that allowing local law enforcement agencies to conduct background checks on handgun buyers was a violation of the 10th Amendment.

Even scarier was the 1999 case of Timothy Joe Emerson, whose lawyer successfully argued that his client’s Second Amendment right to bear arms was violated by his restraining order. Mr Emerson had been arrested for threatening his estranged wife and child with a handgun.

One month after the Columbine shootings, the NRA spent more than $1 million on mailouts and phonebanks to oppose Senate legislation requiring background checks at gunshows and pawnshops, and revocation of gun ownership for people convicted of gun crimes as juveniles.

For a country with a history of presidential assassinations and public massacres, and a gun crime rate hundreds of times greater than most comparable developed nations, the liberal access to assault weapons continues to defy all logic, or notions of “liberty and justice for all.”

Unfortunately, the pro-gun ethos is now so ingrained in America that the objectives of gun-control in a functioning, lawful democracy are lost amongst the Mad-Max battle-plans of how to survive in a heavily compromised society.

For example, the Virginia Tech tragedy last year, when a Korean national, with a history of mental illness and stalking female students, legally purchased two semi-automatic pistols and killed 32 people. The gun lobby blamed the Universities ‘gun-free zone’, and promoted more gun ownership by students and teachers, to defend against murderous lunatics in the future. This was the problem, said the NRA. Not the legislation that they themselves are responsible for which makes it possible for anybody to buy semi-automatic weapons over the internet, at pawn shops and gun shows, with less trouble than it would take to book an overseas holiday or adopt a dog from the pound.

Legislators owe it to constituents to resist the political might of the gun lobby and work to protect the population from one of its most devastating public health crises.