Without getting into the details of yesterday's Supreme Court 5 to 4 ruling restricting states and local governments from enforcing their gun control laws on an individuals right to bear arms within their respective jurisdictions, the Court's conservative majority seemed intent to further the folly that a citizen carrying a gun is legal and appropriate, even in today's often violent urban settings.
It's as if the law enforcement authorities of our large cities of today, who are the prime initiators pushing to get gun control measures enacted (and where handgun crime is so prevalent) are unknowledgeable and should have no say in a matter they deal with on a daily basis.
To this observer, the Court's majority is living in a fictionalized past that continues to misconstrue the intent of the 2nd Amendments founders where at a time of no standing army, it wanted "the people to keep and bear arms" whenever it would become necessary by the state to organize and form a militia to defend themselves and the country. Back then, the states militia did not supply the arms; it was expected of the individual militia men to supply their own.
This continued misinterpreted relic of the 2nd Amendment has allowed, protected and led to another unfortunate happenstance, the rise and spread of independent conservative militia movements all over the country. Groups seemingly biding their time, in some fictionalized paranoid delusion, awaiting the call to coalesce and come together to overthrow the government.
It has also allowed the NRA to advance its agenda promoting widespread gun ownership and denouncing all gun control measures as illegal and unconstitutional. So effective has been its lobby in Congress the House has just proposed a bill providing exclusive exemption for the NRA, absolving it from having to report its financial backing of political candidates or the "swift boat" type mudslinging operations it has financed in the past against those they oppose.
Consider the fact we are the only advanced industrialized society that permits the widespread ownership of firearms by its people. We are the leading supplier of firearms to the world.
Is it any wonder that in the drug related killings in the Mexican border towns of the U.S., particularly close to Texas, the firearms used are purchased in the U.S.?
Of course one may be hard put to pinpoint a direct correlation between a Supreme Court ruling limiting state and local gun control provisions with widespread violence from firearms.
The same could be said of negative political ads denouncing gun control advocates and what direct effect they have on the outcome of elections.
Yet if the air you breathe and the water you drink smell and tastes toxic, you don't need a study or a commission of experts to tell you what you already know.
Guns in a civil society are a lethal mixture. Banning gun ownership won't stop violent crime, but expanding their legal use just makes for the increased possibility of a civil breakdown of that society.
