Rosanne Cash: The NRA “Funds Domestic Terrorism”

Country singer Rosanne Cash has penned an Op-Ed for the New York Times today, imploring the country-music community to support stricter gun-control measures and ripping the National Rifle Association, which she says “funds domestic terrorism,” in the wake of the massacre at a country-music festival in Las Vegas this weekend.

“A shadow government exists in the world of gun sales, and the people who write gun regulations are the very people who profit from gun sales,” she writes. “The N.R.A. would like to keep it that way.”

Cash, the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, has been a vocal gun-control advocate for decades, particularly as a member of the Center to Prevent Youth Violence, an organization that aims to prevent gun violence among children. In her Op-Ed, she decries the inadequacy of U.S. laws meant to keep military-style weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill, and calls out Congress for its complete failure not just to tighten restrictions on who can purchase weapons and ammunition, but indeed for its work to loosen those very restrictions.

She cites a vote this week on Capitol Hill to potentially broaden access to gun silencers and armor-piercing bullets, writing, “If the proposed law had passed before the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday, and the rifles in the assailant’s hotel room had been fitted with silencers, one could safely assume that the death toll would be much, much higher. Those who ran from the concert and survived did so because they heard the gunfire. None of that matters to the N.R.A.”