After all their ideals only appeal to a very fringe "loony" section of Australian society.
And what's this with fundamentalist Islam?
Well, I direct you all to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald
The author Nick O'Malley US correspondent for Fairfax Media
He went to the NRA national convention.
These are a few extracts from his article.
"Despite all the guns, the music, the show bags and the raffles, despite the thousands of stalls, the real business of the convention was done a floor above the exhibition hall in a ballroom that seats 8000."
"It is in this room that it becomes clear what this event really is: a conservative political rally directed by a single-interest group at the height of its powers.
When the group's figurehead, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre strides onto the stage, after members have held hands for a prayer, the crowd erupts and he starts dishing out the red-meat rhetoric they love. I vow on this day the NRA will stand shoulder to shoulder with you and good, honest decent Americans and we will stand and fight with everything we've got and in 2016, by God, we will elect the next great president of the United States of America and it will not be Hillary Rodham Clinton," he says."
"Rick Santorum, a hard right Catholic says, "Freedom is under assault not by the gay and lesbian community, but by the left in America ... What is under assault today is the freedom to exercise your faith."
The hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham, "We're at war. This is not a time of peace," he says. "My goal is to make sure that we go after those bastards that are trying to kill us and everybody like us, and make sure they feel the wrath of this country – that we dig them out and we kill them, because there is no other substitute."
"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations," he said."
"In Nashville it becomes clear that the NRA has successfully bundled and packaged all of these anxieties and linked them to gun ownership. It has done it so effectively that the Republican Party is bound to show up in force.
Its candidates know that while an NRA endorsement does not guarantee victory, NRA opposition can kill a campaign.
Fear then is the source of the LaPierre's power. He can maintain membership, dues and donations, and he can direct the voting of 3.5 million-plus members, as long as he can keep them scared of a world that he once memorably described as being full of "terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all".
To me the rhetoric of fear and mistrust, the idea of you are either with them or against them is the exact same rhetoric of fundamentalist Islam such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. They divide a society and in particular the vulnerable and turn people against each other. This is worrying to me because this attracts all of the conservative politicians in the USA and if they get control of both houses of parliament and the Presidency their loony rhetoric may become more mainstream.
This is worrying for Australia and our kowtowing to the USA government and following them into any crackpot war they may choose to start, such as Iraq.
We need good strong independent politicians to fight the ideas of this possible loony right group coming to power in the USA.
