Here we go again. Another mass shooting, another left/right argument over gun control or as the left is now calling gun "safety." This is confusing; I just got used to feeling at fault for the ravages of global warming. Now it's known as climate change, and good old fashioned illegal aliens are now referred to as undocumented immigrants. What exactly is a poor conservative to feel guilty about, and responsible for, if they keep changing the words?
Back to guns.
Second Amendment:
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.
Now that sounds simple enough. How can one sentence create so much disharmony?
A Militia is defined as:
A military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency.
with a couple of sub-definitions:
-a military force that engages in rebel or terrorist activities, typically in opposition to a regular army.
People are defined as:
Human beings in general or considered collectively.
with a sub-definition:
--the men, women, and children of a particular nation, community, or ethnic group.
Infringe is defined as:
Actively break the terms of (a law, agreement, etc.).
with a sub-definition:
--act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on
So, it would seem to me that what the framers were saying is that the federal government should not limit the military nor the people from having guns. A couple of more recent Supreme court decisions have backed up my rather scholarly interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.
It would seem the left is rather hesitant to arm the "militia" with the biggest and baddest of war toys and will do everything in its power to limit gun access by the people. The left does not say that people can or should not have guns, they just want to throw as much administrative inconveniences at gun ownership as they can get away with. This I find interesting, when the right wants an ID card to be required to vote ( a constitutional right) the left cries voter suppression but is very willing to require considerably more paperwork to own a gun which is also a constitutional right. Are they not then making it more difficult for the poor and minorities to exercise their gun-totin' rights? Gun suppression?
But I digress.
In the US we have 319 million people 112,000 guns per 100,000 people (yes, more guns than people). We have 821.5 deaths per 100,000 per year and only 10.4 of those are gun related. We are more likely to die from Alzheimer or diarrhea than by being shot. The mass shooting fatalities per 100K is .31. Then let's throw in the fact that young children are 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than by a gun. (I will now leave some space to insert anti-gun statistics because there are enough on both sides to go around.)
The fact is guns are here to stay; there is no "expired by" date on the 300 million plus guns that now exist in the US, and new weapons are being bought in record numbers. The question is how do we work with that reality?
A segment of our society is obviously easily placated by "feel good" legislation so since politicians only response to any problem is to make legislation their go-to solution, they conclude they should make the background checks more extensive. It doesn't seem to matter that the Federal bureaucracy can't handle effectively and efficiently what we have now. Even 10 more pages of background checks would not have stopped the rash of mass shooting we have had recently, but it sounds good.
The last four presidents have averaged 16.5 mass shootings during their terms and President Obama has had 162 in seven years, and he has passed 23 gun control executive orders since Sandy Hook. We now have more gun laws now than ever before. Less types of guns are legally available to the average citizen than ever before. We also have more “gun-free zones,” zones where, by the way, most of these shootings happen. The prevalent thought is let's pass some more laws so we can all go to bed at night feeling good. Maybe not feeling any safer, but feeling good.
My personal opinion is you really have to "work" the words of the second amendment to get anything else out of it other than the people have a right to own weapons. I understand the desire to see the world the way one would like it to be, but concentrating on controlling the gun to make the world a better place is misplaced effort.
To change a habit we need to reward what we want done and/or punish what we don't want done. We reward good gun behavior by getting off the backs of good gun owners, and we reward bad gun owners by various level of punishment. The direction we seem to be going is making life more complicated for good gun owners and doing little or nothing more to punish the bad gun owner. I'm not sure how well that's going to work.
Guns are here to stay. If we just invented the first gun I'm sure we would have handled things differently but those 300 million horses are out of the barn. Guns ownership is a constitutional right, but we don't have a right to use them irresponsibly. When weapons are used irresponsibly we must significantly increase current punishment levels. I know that will be hard for the far left to accept, but that's what it looks like from the far right.
