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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 5/25/22

To Stop Gun Violence, Form a Well-Regulated Militia

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2nd Amendment
2nd Amendment
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The Second Amendment to the Constitution:

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.

Here we are again. Another mass shooting, coming just a week after yet another mass shooting in Buffalo, New York targeting black people. This most recent one was targeting kids, 19 of them. A teacher got in the way and made the 20th fatality. The shooter's Grandmother was the first victim of the 18-year old's killing spree.

The details hardly matter anymore: there's always a history of violence, anger and bullying, then retribution, etc. ad nauseum. You can read more about this particular kid's circumstances here if you choose to. He was a victim before he was a victimizer. The first part could be said of a thousand kids like him. Good luck trying to figure out which one of the thousand would finally act out by shooting his imagined tormentors.

We've run the guns-don't-kill-people, people-kill-people experiment dozens of times now. It's as clear as it can be that countries, or states within our country, that have lax gun laws, or which make them more lax, have more shootings, including suicide, which for some reason is not even considered worth mentioning though it is where the majority of shootings end up.

The former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had an excellent editorial on gun violence published today. It was first published in 2017 and has been regularly repeated with minor updates every time there is a mass shooting, which is too often for me to remember now. You can read it here and maybe refer back to this as you read the rest of this article.

Two things are indisputably true: First, America has more privately owned guns per capita than any other country and it has more shootings of every kind than any other country, with the possible exception of nearly lawless Yemen, which is also in a Civil War. Second, Republicans are slaves to the NRA and terrified that voting for any kind of gun control will cost them the next election (whether they should be more concerned over losing an election vs. saving lives is a discussion for another time, but no one ever lost money betting against the morality or spine of a politician).

Without Senator Joe Manchin's (D(ino) - W.V.) the 60-vote requirement to pass gun control laws cannot be overcome with any realistic electoral outcome of the Constitutionally rural and red-state-favoring electoral college. It doesn't matter that 93% of the country, including most Republicans, favor background checks - which the Uvalde, Texas shooter passed anyway. Gunman Salvador Ramos bought his mass murder arsenal legally, under both national and Texas laws. There are a host of laws that could have made that harder. See the Kristoff article, or the repeated Onion articles that have run for the last 10 years of mass shootings:

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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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