nes being what they are, I'm not sure which gun tragedy will be foremost on your mind when you read this column. I am confident, however, that there will be one. Somebody shot up a campus, a mall, a workplace, today, yesterday or tomorrow. In America, gun massacres are always in the news.
Is there anything we can do to stop the cascade of corpses appearing nightly on our screens, large and small? Other than buy a smartphone case covered in black crepe?
Yes, there is. We can repeal the Second Amendment. That's a good place to start. That's the only place to start, because every effort we make at sensible gun regulation runs up against that brick wall and falls down as dead as the latest victims of random, massively predictable gun violence.
The Second Amendment assures we can do nothing to reduce the gun carnage that kills about 30,000 Americans per year. True, 20,000 of them are suicides, but the Second Amendment makes suicide far too easy. Over half of all successful suicides are by self-inflicted gunshot and at that range you rarely miss.
I wonder how many of those gunshot suicides would change their minds if they had a second chance? The Second Amendment could be called the "No Second Chance" Amendment, for suicides and rash, un-premeditated murders alike. A gun just makes killing too easy.
Every time a kindergarten full of kids is shot up and an outraged nation mourns, somebody will call for a new law, something simple and obvious, like limiting a magazine to say, a hundred rounds, and for a day or two it seems like a good idea. Then comes the "You can't do that, it's against the Second Amendment!" and the NRA cackles into its Dracula cloak.
The NRA is entirely correct. We can't do squat about the epidemic of gun violence plaguing the nation because the Second Amendment won't let us.
The Second Amendment is the only thing that is immune to gunshots in America. The Second Amendment is lead-proof.
But it's not vote-proof. We can repeal it and we should. I'm not saying it will be easy, many people are fanatic about their guns. They say having weaponry is a right worth dying for. They've got that right.
The original justification for the Second Amendment was, as far as anyone can tell, to protect the people from tyranny. Well, actually they said something about a well-regulated militia but I don't think even they knew what that meant.
But whatever it meant, it is clearly obsolete now. How is a handheld weapon supposed to protect one from a government that can shoot a predator drone through your bedroom window before you can take the safety off your AK?
So it's not about defending yourself against tyranny. But what about sportsmen? Some people cherish the Second Amendment because they want to go into the woods and kill Bambi. We have a long and hallowed tradition of going into the woods and killing Bambi in America. It stems from the days when Bambi was food.
Personally, I prefer Bambi packaged, butchered and stacked on the supermarket shelf, but I admit to some hypocrisy there. If I really loved Bambi that much I'd be a vegetarian and I'm no such thing.
I'm not saying it should be automatically illegal to hunt the poor defenseless critters of forest and stream. If a state wants to allow that activity they should have that right. But if a state wants, by popular vote of its citizens, to ban rifles, handguns, and/or automatic weaponry it should have that right as well.
But it can't, because of the anachronistic, tyrannical Second Amendment. For freedom's sake, it has to go.
Once upon a time the nation began to wise up about the epidemic of gun violence. Sensible gun regulations were passed in many places and sensible people were pleased.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
2
2
