To many Americans, the Second Amendment is the most important part of the constitution. In fact, many have said that the right to bear arms is the right that guarantees all the rest. It’s a controversial subject, and almost anything I say about it is going to make a lot of people angry, but it’s a topic we can’t afford to ignore, a topic we need to think very seriously about.
I’m a gun owner. Living in the country, I believe there are legitimate reasons. It took some extra pains on my part to become eligible to buy a firearm legally. If you don’t know why, please check out my other website sometime: going-straight.com.
Now supposedly I also have the right to free speech. Maybe my interpretation is that I can stand on a street corner and yell "Congressman Loudmouth is a blithering idiot!" Suppose a squad car stops and a couple of policemen tell me to shut up or get arrested. Does my right to bear arms mean that I can come back the next day, with a couple of other people who share my view, armed with assault rifles and 9 mm automatics with 40-round clips, plus a couple of bullhorns? Some crackpot at a place called Ruby Ridge thought that being required to pay taxes amounted to unlawful search and seizure, and that his right to bear arms gave him the moral right to stage a holdout with federal agents; you probably know the tragic results of that.
Need I go on? The idea that you could possibly defend yourself, or would ever need to defend yourself, against your own government with your own rifles and shotguns and pistols is nothing short of preposterous. Meanwhile, the costs of our juvenile fixation on guns is staggering. Firearms are involved in 68% of homicides, 52% of suicides, 43% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults. It’s not gangs that make tough neighborhoods unlivable, it’s gangs with guns. Children don’t get killed in their own living rooms in a drive-by stabbing or strangling; it’s a drive-by shooting.
You’ve heard that cliche "When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." Poppycock. First of all, no one is trying to "outlaw" guns. There have been efforts to impose better gun controls. Second, if guns were less plentiful, it would be harder for those outlaws to get guns. Third, no one whose intentions are at all legitimate needs to be able to buy one gun a day. Anyone who wants to do that is either a little deranged, in my professional opinion, or may be hoping to start an armed revolution.
My wife and I own three motor vehicles. Each one has a license plate. If I commit a vehicular homicide and anyone gets my license number, the police know whom to ask about it. That’s only right. Now suppose a bullet from a gun that I own winds up in the body of a dead police officer. I see no reason that the ballistics of my weapon should not be on file with the FBI, just like fingerprints, so that the police would, in that case also, have a prime suspect from the start. Just as it’s a federal crime to convert a semi-automatic to a machine gun, or to use a silencer, if we had a national ballistics registration, as I think we should, it could be a federal crime to knowingly alter the ballistics.
Shotguns are a little more complicated. I don’t have an easy answer, but would be interested in knowing what suggestions you might have.
At present, the most alarming development in our world-famous right to bear arms obsession is people strutting around public meetings armed to the teeth. So far, I believe, they are believed to be those who sympathize with far-right views. But let’s remember that in the 60s and 70s it was some on the far left who were resorting to bombs and guns to get their point across. Are we headed for the point when we’ll have opposing political "militias," as has happened in many other countries?
How far down that road are we willing to go? If we go too much further, I’m afraid we can kiss democracy as we know it goodbye for at least a generation.
Is it time to go back to the interpretation of a "well regulated militia" as the constitution described it, instead of everybody who can get a gun, as decided recently by the supreme court?
If you can discuss the subject in a civil manner, I definitely want to know your views on this.