It comes down to this: either guns or life. Make your pick. You only get one. With modern weapons, there is no longer any middle ground. After every savage slaughter, whether Columbine or Virginia Tech or wherever, we see it again. The gun control people on the left say that guns have to be outlawed, as they are in nearly every other country of the world. The right’s gun proponents counter that no one may disarm them. The latter are sorry that innocent lives are lost thanks to one or two disturbed persons. The former claim that the badly misused Second Amendment allows guns only for a well regulated militia, not individuals whether disturbed or not.
The full text of that amendment, put in force in 1791, 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.” To which militia did Adam Lanza or his mother belong? How can our highest courts so twist this simple sentence to allow rapid fire assault rifles or handguns to pass into the hands of a dangerous person as easily as they can to a competent target shooter or hunter or gun collector?
It is the job of the police and military to see to the security of this nation by resort to deadly arms. They are the well regulated militia, not the National Rifle Association, which has been so instrumental in bankrolling office holders statewide and nationally who will defend this pretense of a right at the cost of innocent babies. All with a straight face. They will cite absurd conspiracy theories, the kind that so invigorate the apparently low-T right, that unless citizens keep guns in their basements, the government will take over and black helicopters will swoop in and arrest us all. And so today, there is one gun for every citizen in the U.S., so widespread is gun possession. In one particularly secession-minded state, it is customary to give a boy his first gun on his 10th birthday.
This is the logical outgrowth of the ever more insistent clamor that the government is the problem. If they really believed this, why do they run for office? Who can credibly claim that less government would have saved the lives of the Newtown children and adults? Yet incredibly enough, pro-gun zealots assert that if the adults had been armed, they would have stopped Lanza. A wild-west shootout down corridors with cinder block walls ricocheting bullets everywhere would have brought down the assassin, they say. Yet studies have shown that homes with guns result in a child or adult of that home being hurt or killed more often than an intruder.
Argue that some government laws are obsolete. Repeal them. Argue that the tax funds it takes for some government offices and programs can burden struggling people a paycheck away from foreclosure. Trim them. But stop the childish nonsense that we can wind the clock back to 1791 when we first became the land of the free, and went hunting for supper with our muskets with little government interference.
Why is the NRA so powerful? Who are its members? The organization, which posts on its Washington office exterior only the part of the Second Amendment after the clause about a well regulated militia, puts out slick public relations pap that they are everyday citizens, our very neighbors who value such American traditions as hunting or collecting or skeet-shooting. Can that be all? Are such concerns worth more than the hundreds of gun deaths each month in this gun-goofy society? Defense is the great raison d’etre of the NRA. People think they need guns to protect themselves and their families. So as regrettable as are the deaths of so many innocents, gun owners claim a superior right to arms. They have little trust in police apparently, unlike most other countries that outlaw our easy access to guns.
I would like to see the day when every bullet is bar-coded and entered into a national data base so it can be traced to a buyer. More than that I would like to see the U.S. join the community of nations and outlaw guns. But most of all I would like to see people regard the safety of others as more important than their paranoia about government, their pleasure in gun possession and their ruinous individualism.
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