The aftermath of school shootings is now all too familiar. The shock of the breaking news, the scenes of school evacuations, the ensuing political debate and the inevitable inaction.
(Huffington Post, June 16, 2014)
It has become customary to say that America has a gun-violence problem. But what America really has is a gun problem – notwithstanding the NRA propagating the specious slogan that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
After all, imagine how many schoolchildren would have been spared if all of the crazy kids who went on shooting rampages in recent years had access only to knives, instead of such easy access to guns. If that’s too farfetched, then imagine how many still would have been spared if it were illegal to sell semi-automatic guns and assault rifles equipped with high-capacity magazines … just to maximize carnage.
America has suffered an appalling 74 school shootings since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Dec. 2012 — and the carnage is sure to worsen in a nation dominated by politicians who refuse to combat gun violence.
‘There’s no developed country on Earth that would put up with this. And it now happens once a week. We should be ashamed,’ President Obama declared [last week] after the latest assault weapon attack, this one in Oregon.
(New York Daily News, June 14, 2014)
Unfortunately, the parents of schoolchildren are too consumed with fear to be ashamed. Nothing demonstrates this quite like parents wasting money on bulletproof backpacks for their kindergartners, as if their unprotected heads and chests are naturally so (i.e., bulletproof).
The problem, of course, is that far too many politicians, including some in Obama’s own Democratic Party, are more worried about the NRA running political ads to oust them from Congress than they are about crazy people firing bullets to kill innocent schoolchildren.
What’s more, they rationalize their unconscionable, venal cowardice by parroting not only the NRA’s slogans, but its plainly contrived distortion of the Second Amendment as well.
‘A fraud on the American public.’ That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.
Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an individual right to a firearm widely accepted, but increasingly states are also passing laws to legalize carrying weapons on streets, in parks, in bars — even in churches.
(Politico, May 19, 2014)
Indeed, no less a problem is that far too many political commentators are proselytizing the NRA’s propaganda about the Constitution guaranteeing an unfettered individual right to bear any kind of firearm. This is why, for years, I’ve been like John the Baptist, preaching the truth not only about the Second Amendment, but also about the NRA’s agenda:
The Second Amendment specifically refers to ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.’ No doubt the framers thought it necessary because the American people might have to mount a second revolution if their own government became too tyrannical. But I suspect they thought this militia was necessary primarily to guard against enemies foreign (namely the avenging British), not domestic.
Whatever the case, the framers drafted this amendment 225 years ago. But they would not have even thought of it if, back then, the United States had the well regulated police forces, to say nothing of the well regulated military forces, it has today.
It’s arguable therefore that the Second Amendment pertains primarily to those actively involved in ensuring national security. This means that nobody else has the right to ‘keep and bear arms.’ After all, the framers could not conceive of a US government so powerful (as it is today) that mounting a second revolution against it (no matter how tyrannical it becomes) would constitute mass suicide…
[T]he NRA has perpetrated a brazen and unconscionable fraud on the American people by pretending to be arch defenders of their right to keep and bear arms.
Because the NRA is just the lobbying arm of gun manufacturers, and its sole mission is to ensure that those manufactures have the right to sell as many guns of every type to as many people as possible. Period!
(“The Second Amendment and Gun Control,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 19, 2012)
I must confess, however, that the NRA has so dominated public debate on gun control in recent years that even I was not aware of Chief Justice Burger’s 1990 lament about this “fraud on the American public” when I wrote my similar lament two years ago.
Even more troubling, though, is that the conservative, Republican-appointed members of today’s Supreme Court, who constitute its majority, seem willfully oblivious. Because, far from affirming Burger’s unassailable interpretation of the Second Amendment, they are towing the NRA’s line – as if, like politicians, they fear the NRA running political ads against them too.
Emboldened by a seminal U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2008 that upstanding Americans have the fundamental right to keep guns in their homes, the NRA has involved itself in hundreds of legal cases, many in California…
The NRA and other Second Amendment advocates have filed ‘a whole slew of lawsuits’ using the 2008 high court ruling to challenge gun-control laws enacted after Sandy Hook.
(The Associated Press, April 5, 2014)
To be fair, on extremely rare occasions the one “centrist” among the Court’s five conservative, Republican-members (namely, Justice Anthony Kennedy) votes with its four liberal, Democratic-appointed members to slap the NRA on the wrist. This was the case just yesterday, when he joined them in a 5-4 ruling, which held that only a “numskull” could think he has a constitutional right to lie on a federal form for background checks when purchasing a gun. (This is how distorted/insane the debate on gun control has become folks.)
By the way, it’s not only the case that the NRA cares no more about gun violence than drug cartels do; the NRA does not even care about the direct correlation between it championing the unfettered sale of all guns and the gun violence associated even with the sale of illicit drugs.
Meanwhile, even high school reunions aren’t safe. This was brought into tragic relief in Illinois on Saturday, when a woman and her new boyfriend were shot dead by her ex-husband right in front of her old classmates. An off-duty FBI agent, who just happened to be at the sports bar where the reunion was being held, prevented this man-scorned from perpetrating a wholesale massacre by shooting him dead.
Well, until the next massacre then….
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Gun control debate is insane…