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It didn't take long for right-wing loonies to emerge from the woodwork and exonerate guns in the massacre of 33 students and professors at Virginia Tech University Monday.Leading loony, George W. Bush, had to immediately kiss butt lest the National Rifle Association (NRA) find displeasure in him, so he emphasized that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms far all. That statement is not true and it certainly is not comforting to the parents, siblings, spouses, children or other relatives of those murdered, but that matters not to Bush, who must always appeal to his base.
On the same day as the shooting rampage right-wing columnist Michele Malkin was on the radio defending ownership of guns by anyone.
The NRA will spend the next several days repeating the lies it has used for decades to keep the nation as dangerous as it is. Its spokesmen will claim:
1) The answer is more guns. The NRA and other "gundamentalists" on the right will always argue that if everyone were carrying a gun, someone would have stopped the shooting before it went too far. But in the shooting rampage at the University of Texas in Austin years ago, no gun owner attempted to stop Charles Whitman, who killed 16. It's common in Texas that, for the most part, pickup trucks are equipped with gun racks that are usually fully stocked, but none were used to combat the murder rampage. And if every person were armed at all times, every traffic accident, road-rage incident, neighbor dispute, or family argument could erupt into gunfire. We have too much of that already.
2) Liberals will confiscate all guns. It appears the NRA is as ignorant of the Fifth Amendment as it is the Second (see below to see how ignorant the NRA is on the Second). The Fifth says that no one can be deprived of "life, liberty or property "without due process of law." A firearm is property. If NRA leaders could read competently, they would see that "due process" involves indictment, trial, conviction and punishment. That means no gun confiscation is constitutionally possible unless someone has been convicted of a crime and surrendering of a gun is part of the punishment.
3) Gun control will not prevent gun violence. In nations where gun ownership is extremely difficult there are no, or extremely rare, incidents such as we have seen at Virginia Tech, the University of Texas, Columbine High School, Luby's cafeteria in Texas, an elementary schoolyard in Stockton, California, or various Post Offices or other workplaces around the nation. Memory does recall small incidents in Canada and Great Britain, but little else. If strict rules for obtaining firearms were put into effect today, they would have little immediate influence on gun crimes but would have major impact years in the future.
4) Everyone has an individual right to a gun. That is not true. See what James Madison, the man who wrote the Second Amendment, had to say about that below.
5) Second Amendment is necessary to resist tyranny by the federal government. That is also untrue, as told below.
The Second Amendment says, "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."
Madison knew what he wanted when he wrote and proposed the Second Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights. The First Congress that approved the Bill of Rights and the states that ratified it must have also known what the right to keep and bear arms was all about,
Madison said "A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country."
That's it. The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to provide for national defense, and for no other reason. It wasn't there so the people could rise up in rebellion against a future tyrannical national government, as the NRA falsely claims, and it wasn't included for self-protection or for shooting birds and lawyers in Texas. Those are just side benefits of an armed society.
When the Second Amendment was adopted, the militia was every able-bodied male in the community.
The phrase "a well regulated militia" refers us back to the body of the Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 16, that puts the power of arming the militia with Congress. Our present National Guard is the militia under a different name, so the Second says Congress has the power to arm the militia by designating that only able-bodied males participating in the militia-National Guard have the right to keep and bear arms. But, as stated above, those not in the Guard can not have their guns taken because of the Fifth Amendment, but could have other restrictions put on them.
The phrase "the right of the people" makes it clear that it is the community that has the right to keep and bear arms, not each individual. If Madison wanted that right to be individual, he would have written something like "no person's right to keep and bear arms shall be infringed."
So, it's up to Congress to do something about the gun violence in America even though the Constitution put many obstacles in its way.
