As a sequel to last week's article on actually doing something about school shootings, I wanted to explain more about who the NRA is and why they have done nothing to curtail mass shootings beyond the same old "arm more citizens" routine. Since it seems obvious to me, and I am writing an opinion piece, I'll tell you what I think of the NRA.

The NRA is an organization that supports big business over the interests of Americans. They have conflated views of how safe we are around guns. Their solution to every mass shooting is, "if their were armed guards." The NRA is a pathetic play on Americans' fears which seems to throw its money at bills that very few of their own members support.

The truth is, the NRA is no longer a grassroots organization as it claims to be. It no longer fights for citizens but rather for the gun-making industry. While the organization does receive some of its large amount of funding from it's nearly 4 million dues-paying members, it also receives large donations from gun-manufacturing companies. As you know, if someone gives you a large amount of money, you feel indebted to them to a certain extent.

For the NRA, this means that they will be catering to a gun manufacturers by using those donations to lobby for bills that support the booming gun business in America. A report in The Atlantic shows that the NRA received nearly 71 million dollars in contributions from both small-time donors whose fears they feed on as well as gun-manufacturing companies.

The NRA creates fear and rallies support in legal gun owners by saying that the government will take away their guns. When President Obama was in the White House, they used every one of his statements about shootings as fear-mongering tactics, calling them an attack on the second amendment.

The largest givers to the NRA, however, are 22 different gun manufacturers, including some of the biggest names in the business, such as Smith and Wesson and SIGARMS.

But these are all reports we have most likely heard before. A more shocking fact is that nearly 70% of dues-paying NRA members disagree with many of the organization's leaderships' ideals and the laws they have lobbied for.

For example, the NRA lobbied to allow people on the suspected terrorist list to purchase guns. While 70% of the members believed that closing what is known as the "terrorist gap" is a good thing, NRA leaders called it a conspiracy to take law abiding citizens' guns. (To understand implications of this, realize that while the Pulse night club shooter was taken off of the terrorist watchlist, keeping him on it would not have prevented him from buying guns. In fact, over 200 people on this list were able to legally purchase guns in 2010.)

Another example of the NRA stepping out of line with members' beliefs is that 74% of NRA members support background checks on every gun sale, while the NRA made a statement against putting such actions into law. For a longer list of extremist ideals that the NRA has supported read this article.

The statistics don't lie. Guns don't make Americans safer, as the NRA would have you believe. Armed guards aren't the answer to everything. I have said it before, and I will say it now: if guns made people safer, America would be the safest country in the world.

See this list by CBC news of the countries who have the most guns per one hundred citizens. Unsurprisingly, the US is number one with 88.8 guns per one hundred citizens. What's surprising is the that next highest countries are ones that many would hesitate to compare the US to. Yemen was number 2 with 54.4 per one hundred citizens; just beyond Switzerland and Finland were countries such as Serbia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Lowest on the list is Canada. This made me wonder: How does the crime rate in Canada (where the gun ration is 30.8 out of a hundred citizens) compare with the crime rate America?

America has three times as many guns per capita as Canada, which is a good match to our violent crime rate which is three times higher than Canada's. While the overall crime rate (which includes petty crimes and non-violent/victimless crimes) is actually higher per capita in Canada, the statistics do not indicate that more guns equal less crime or vice versa. It seems to prove quite the opposite, that more guns create more violent crime.

The NRA is mistaken when they claim that guns make citizens safer. They don't. They actually put us at more risk. For one more example, women are 5 times more likely to die in an instance of domestic abuse when their is a gun in the house. So no, NRA leadership, you are not saving American lives, if anything you are killing people with your extremist lobbying and ridiculous scare tactics.

To save American citizens lives, we must make undeniable steps in the right direction. Let's make it more difficult for mentally unstable and potentially violent people to buy guns. When we fight the NRA, we save lives.