Guns

 

I am a huge supporter of the Bill of Rights. One of the most exciting citizen activist actions currently taking place is Chris Bliss’ Bill of Rights Monuments Project, http://billofrightsmonumentproject.org/ That said and a plug for Chris, I cannot accept the current interpretation of the Second Amendment contained in that Bill of Rights. There are many fallacies in the thinking of Republicans and even some Democrats in the meaning of the Second.

It was not so we could defend ourselves against marauding Native Americans. It wasn’t to ensure the right to own a gun to hunt with. And it wasn’t so South Carolina could defend itself from the power of the federal government. It was so the federal government could put out a call to arms to defend the nation against England, France and any other European nation that thought the young nation was vulnerable.

At least that was the honorable justification for it. The truth of the debate over the Second was more about Southern states remaining armed in defense of slave revolts. It was one more enshrinement of the enslavement of African-Americans. (Ever notice it’s never English-American?)

Were there murders, sure. However, the prevalence of religion made it a far more peaceful society. People worked, they read at night, got up and did it again. On Sabbath they went to services. That was Eighteenth Century living.

Let’s stipulate that a couple of representatives at the Constitutional Congress wanted the Second for self-defense; if we’re going to stipulate that we have to agree also that the modern firearm would have been considered witchcraft. They would have drowned the inventor and kept the gun. Guns after all are power.

Today’s guns have real power. For a rifle a colonist had a single shot musket. For a handgun they had muzzle loaders that also fired a single shot. Now consider how inaccurate they were. Got that image now compare it to an assault rifle which is easy to control and fires a projectile at an immensely greater speed. It is in fact very accurate. A person taking his time can hit a target easily a hundred yards away dead center.

The power of a modern round isn’t the problem, neither is the accuracy. It’s the firing rate that is the problem. What gave the Union a weaponry edge in the Civil War was the repeating rifle and revolver. That’s the way wars are won. One side invents the best way of killing the opposing army.

Take the repeating rifle that was so influential in warfare in the 19th century. For each shot you had to pull down a lever and push it back into the firing position. The famous, Old West, six-shooter you had to use your thumb to pull back the hammer for each shot. Even my father’s carbine in WWII was a bolt action rifle. Only certain soldiers were armed with Browning Automatic Rifle’s (BAR’s). And a machine gun took a team of two to operate.

When semi-automatic fire came about those firing rates went from the time it took to operate a cocking mechanism to the time it takes to pull the trigger. It doesn’t matter as for firing rate if it’s a 9mm Glock or a Bushmaster AR-15. There the difference comes into play when considering the round fired.

An assault rifle round and a 9mm round can easily be compared on Google Images. It’s easy to see that a 9mm round resembles a layperson’s image of a ‘bullet”. Whereas an assault rifle round doesn’t resemble an enlarged bullet, it looks like a scaled downed Howitzer shell. Thus, the difference in damage each round inflicts on the body. Convert an assault rifle to full auto and you’re ready to make history, like in Las Vegas. And that shooter wasn’t at full auto, he was merely using a bump stock that allowed the rifle to fire at a rate “approaching” full auto.

Take all that info into consideration while also considering this. Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger said the modern interpretation that the Second ensures all Americans the “right” to own a firearm is a fraud. How can one not come to the conclusion that the Second needs amending at least, more accurately a complete rewrite.

Face it, the Spanish Armada isn’t sailing up the Chesapeake to the Potomac to attack Washington, so we don’t need everyone armed against that. It’s Central American refugees flooding to our borders, not the Honduran Army so we don’t need everyone armed against that either. Take the sin crimes of gambling, drug use and prostitution off the books and we won’t need to be protecting ourselves from the crimes associated with those laws. Even leaving those laws, not everyone needs a gun.

Even now when in America there are enough guns for everyone to have one, I’d be shocked if half of American adults own any firearm at all, not even a hunting rifle. (Which is deadlier at greater distances than an assault rifle) If that’s the case obviously the people who have guns must tend to have multiple guns and as the evening news shows, some of them have arsenals. Is the White cis-gender male’s ego so fragile he can’t leave the guns to the professionals and just coach little league – you don’t need a Glock in the glove compartment to do that.