The 2nd Amendment and Gun Control

The 2^nd Amendment and Gun Control

 I heard a former Republican Congressman say that the recent tragedy in Tucson shouldn’t be blamed on guns and then I heard newly elected Congressman Rand Paul repeat the old NRA mantra “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” 

Really?

The suspected assassin Loughner used a 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol with extended ammo clips and apparently fired close to 36 bullets and was in the process of reloading when two brave men and a woman tackled him to the ground.  From evidence found in his home it’s obvious that his target was Congresswoman Giffords, and yet he shot 18 other people, killing 6 of them.  Would he have been able to kill and hurt so many people if he had only had a knife?  I think not.

The defenders of the 2^nd amendment take its right to an extreme.  They fail to recognize the context in which the Constitution was written, at a time when this country was still recovering from a revolution against a self-serving monarchy.  The 2^nd Amendment is very concise – “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.”  In 1789 that made sense.  But after more than 200 years of a democratic republic it’s not necessary.  And when taken in the literal sense it allows anti-government “militias” to arm themselves, in effect allowing the potential of terrorism from within.

The NRA claims that guns are necessary for hunters, and unfortunately there are still people in this country who need to hunt for their food.  But do they need hand-guns or assault rifles?  Those who hunt for sport surely can’t be using AK-47’s to down their prey, it would eliminate the challenge of the sport.

I’ll go a little further and ask why any regular citizen would need a handgun?  They do more harm than good.  Here’s a story that I heard from my niece about an acquaintance of hers.  At a tavern in Denver a retired doctor and his wife were dining and watching a college football game.  The doctor was rooting for his alma mater and a drunken patron seated at the bar overheard him and started to verbally abuse him and his wife.  The bartender/manager of the tavern asked the drunken patron to leave and then physically escorted him from the establishment.  The patron went to his car, retrieved a pistol from the glove compartment and returned, shooting and severely injuring the manager and killing the retired doctor.  This is not an isolated incident, these kind of things happen all over the country all the time, they just don’t make the national news. 

I don’t propose that we repeal the 2^nd Amendment.  But we can re-institute the assault weapons ban that was allowed to lapse under the Bush administration.  We can close the gun show loop holes that allow known criminals and mentally ill persons to buy firearms without waiting periods and security checks.  And we can make hand guns illegal.  An avid hunter, if they’re sane, shouldn’t object to that.  And those that are protecting themselves from an imagined out of control government wouldn’t have much use for a handgun anyway.

Unfortunately the tragedy in Tucson has already been forgotten, eclipsed by a blizzard and the crisis in Egypt, and with a Republican majority in Congress not much about gun control will even be discussed.  They’d rather take your health insurance away than your guns.