By the end of Wednesday there was a USA Today/Gallup poll revealing that only 35 percent of Americans thought it was legitimate to blame conservatives for the tragedy, but only around 20 percent wanted more gun control. To this I can only say... WTF?
In the wake of the Tucson tragedy there’s been much speculation and recrimination. Was Jared Loughner a leftist anarchist or a right-wing tea bagger? Was he manic depressive or paranoid schizophrenic? Did he read Karl Marx or Ayn Rand? All this is irrelevant to one incontrovertible fact. Jared Loughner had a gun. Jared Loughner used his gun. His gun performed the task it was designed and engineered for- to kill the maximum number of people in the shortest period of time.
So why are our elected officials not responding to yet another public massacre by firearms and doing something about America’s deadly epidemic of gun violence? How does a political assassination attempt NOT promote a re-examination of our inadequate gun control laws? Instead of a new Brady Bill, our elected officials on both sides of the aisle are shuffling along in lockstep with the corrosive pro-gun policies dictated by a shamelessly profit driven private arms industry.
I think the answer lies in the notion that gun control is not seen as a public health issue but one of constitutional ‘freedom’. It all comes down to the fetish of Americana as based on a doctrinaire interpretation of the Second Amendment as a form of patriotic scripture.
OK. I get that. I’ve read the constitution, and not just the abridged and laminated Tea Party edition. Here’s a visual example of ‘arms’ as defined in the 2nd amendment at the time it was written. This is important if we’re going to insist on the intent of our founding fathers-
Now here’s an actual example of the gun that was used in Tucson.
See the difference? One is a gun and the other's more like a directional hand grenade. And while we’re parsing the 2nd amendment, let’s touch on to the subject of militias in the 21st century. Thanks to Googleology, turns out that American militias with websites seem to mostly revolve around dimwitted principles such as a a collective right to not pay taxes of any kind, or some lingering inchoate hatred of Janet Reno. Whatever they are, the words ‘well regulated’ do not come to mind. I’ll take our National Guard over the United American Freedom Foundation, thank you very much.
Problem is all this talk about freedom results in more than 280 million semi-automatic weapons circulating like pathogens in our national bloodstream. And whose freedom is truly at stake here?
There are two types of freedom. There is the freedom ‘to do’ something, like drive a four-wheel drive anything anywhere you please, or tote a concealed .357 magnum into a convenience store. And there is the freedom ‘from’ something, like the freedom (while say,hiking the wilderness) from getting run over by some monoxide spewing loud gas powered POS, or the freedom (while, say, buying a newspaper) from getting caught in a crossfire of blazing hot lead.
My feeling, and it’s a personal one, is that a gun owner’s freedom to carry around a weapon in public, without any training or necessary understanding of how to operate it infringes on my freedom to life (gunshots often being fatal), liberty (from the hospital) and certainly the pursuit of happiness (as I wonder every day if my kids will come home from school safely).
I would add to this the abridging freedom of a commercial enterprise, such as Wal Mart, to sell cases of high-powered ammo with less consequence and employee training than a 7-11 sells beer.
Another NRA point of nostalgia concerns the sportsman’s rights to weaponry. I’ll leave debating the ‘sportsmanship’ of shooting defenseless forest creatures with a gun to another day, but it’s quite apparent that if you need a semi-automatic assault weapon, like an AR-15 Bushmaster to gun down some squirrels, you should not be ‘hunting’ in the first place. And what animal, other than maybe rats at the dump, are you shooting with a handgun? The vast majority of weapons out there are specifically designed to hunt people, not animals. Thus noble notion of subsistence hunting is at best quaint and anachronistic and at worst, a shameless marketing smokescreen for merchandising death to an increasingly suggestible and thereby terrified American gun market.
But, you might say as an enlisted RBKA Kossack, I need my guns to protect myself against the tyranny of my own government. That's what the 2nd Amendment is all about. Well, then my advice to you is this: if you're going to take on the US Military, I don't think that Smith and Wesson is going to cut it. Better start shopping around on Ebay for one of these-
Where does this anti-goverment paranoia end? With backyards strung with claymore mines? Consumer model tactical missles? How about neighborhood nuclear superiority? There's a domestic arms dealer's wet dream.
But I digress. My point is this. When is a better time to renew our call for more effective gun control in this country? How about right now, starting with restricting magazine capacity, reaffirming the Assault Weapons Ban, increased penalties for unlawful conversion to full auto, harsher penalties for failing to secure weapons from access by children. What about a universal competency test for CCR’s , so at least we can know if the carrier is lucid and actually understands how to use the weapon (as opposed to letting it slip out of his waistband)? With your support, we can maybe even cheer up our friend from the Bay State-
There's always been a separate argument for how much you should be able to shoot without reloading. It doesn't interfere with your right to defend your home, or shoot a deer, or anything. But given the Republicans' religious view of this, I don't see how it's going to happen." - Rep. Barney Frank