The earth is flat. The sun revolves around it, rising in the east and setting in the west. The tooth fairy gives you cash for teeth. Global warming is a commie plot to stop the annual government subsidies for Big Oil. You can’t cheat an honest man, and this on the word of W.C. Fields. Even though Pope John Paul II allowed capital punishment only to states too weak to incarcerate capital offenders, we may continue injecting ours. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
If a politician said it, it’s gospel. If you saw it in an advertisement, it’s true. One can be spiritual but not religious even if all recognized spiritualities came from some religion. A woman’s right to privacy outweighs her unwanted baby’s right to live, even though it never asked to be there. The gold and silver buyers who use those tremendously expensive full-page ads, sometimes two pages each day, will only be buying your metals this week — and certainly at a fair price. We don’t need new gun laws; we just need to enforce the ones on the books.
War is hell but we have to have it to keep the economy going. God made us humans the stewards of creation, so we may dominate it with no concern for other forms of life. Slavery is allowable even if distasteful because it’s in the Bible. God made the races, so we have no business intermarrying. Whoever dies with the most toys wins. Greed is good. Social justice is socialism: the adjective gives it away. Capitalism sees to it that wealth trickles down to the lower levels, so those down there should keep working. A well regulated militia can be our military and police and whoever else the National Rifle Association says it is, even if that includes anti-government white supremacists.
“America” magazine had a cover editorial in February advocating the repeal of the Second Amendment. The full text of that 1791 amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The context has changed enormously, from a time of post-Revolutionary society that had declared and gotten independence from England to one of technological fiendishness in weaponry. Must we have automatic rifles to bring down a deer that can’t shoot back? Do we need high-capacity gun clips that out-gun the police? Why can most other countries of the world outlaw gun possession (except for hunters, target shooters and collectors) and all together have fewer gun deaths than us who see eighty each day?
After only 15 years we repealed with the Twenty-First Amendment the Eighteenth, which had prohibited alcohol. We did not see this as mistreating the Constitution. We saw the noble motive of the “Great Experiment” but we decided that prohibition caused far more trouble than it prevented. If times could change so much between 1918 and 1933, it seems that they have changed far more since 1791. We have imbedded in our national psyche a ruthless, rugged individualism that makes killing people acceptable for reasons astonishing to other well developed nations.
The desire to protect one’s family with a gun is understandable in a country of 300 million guns, a figure that surpasses the second country allowing guns, Yemen. We have 88.8 guns per hundred citizens, they have 54.8. If everyone else is armed, I must be, too, for my self-defense. But studies have shown that homes with guns experience violence far more than those without them. One study of three U.S. cities revealed that injuries involving guns kept at home almost always resulted from accidental firings, criminal assaults, homicides and suicides by the residents, not self-defense scenarios. We seem to have some inverted logic that says pouring more gasoline on the fire will drown it. We want to protect ourselves from violence by enabling far more of it. It works about as well as the logic in the first three paragraphs.
The NRA argument that gun-carrying citizens would have cut the carnage in the darkened Aurora theater limps: it would have resulted in more casualties. A man with a gun hesitated to draw it when Gabby Giffords was shot precisely because he thought he would be mistaken for a fellow assassin.
Guns don’t kill people. People with guns firing bullets kill people. Disarmed people in other countries with far fewer homicides seem to accomplish what we cannot.