Amendment Two: “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.”
If not the most controversial amendment these days, it seems to be the most polarized. At one extreme, you have those who feel that guns are nothing but a danger to society, with the risk posed to the public outweighing the possible safety benefits, and, as such, will fervently refuse to even enter a home where the dreaded object rests. At the other, you have the gun nuts who think that, in order to be safe, every good American should have a bunker filled to the brim with any and every kind of projectile-firing powder weapon known to man.
Somewhere in the middle are most Americans, who are made a little uncomfortable, or a little excited, by the presence or possession of a firearm. Even statisticians can’t agree. There are so many studies to back up both sides that it’s often used in stat classes as a prime example of how easy it is to manipulate statistics to fit an agenda. It has been to be true that, while guns can be an effective deterrent to criminals, the fact that they are legal and common does lead to a drastically higher number of fatal injuries amongst the public. There are new studies every year that point out, one way or the other, that guns in the home both make it safer from those outside the home and much more dangerous for those in the home.
So why did the founding fathers think that this was the second most important thing we needed to form a country? What you have to realize is that these guys were sitting around a room after a long, bloody war with Britain where it was, quite literally, the common man fighting against an overwhelming, oppressive regime. Not only that, but many historians acknowledge that, had Americans not made certain innovations in firearm development during the war, we may well all be saluting a different flag every afternoon before tea.
To the men who were drafting The Constitution, the enemy was literally just over their shoulders and they realized how fragile their situation was. We didn’t have an army, we had a militia. We won the war not so much because we were fighting for our homeland, but more likely because we were fighting in our homeland, with which we were much more familiar and therefore able to use every dirty, guerilla tactic in the book. We were able to field a militia only because, in the years prior to the way, most every home had a rifle or two for hunting, because grocery stores were notoriously hard to come by and people loved meat.
So the founding fathers realized that, in order to keep anyone from coming over and taking our new country away, we all needed to have guns and know how to use them, at least until we could fashion a real army like everyone else, which we promptly set about doing.
The problem, and this is almost always the case with decisions inspired mostly by fear, is that they forgot something important, which was that last bit about the army, something which came back to seriously bite them in the ass a few years later when half the country decided that they wanted to be a separate country altogether and had more than enough guns to make a fairly good show of succession.
While that one was completely on them for not seeing it coming, given that slavery and the business practices which it fueled and around which it revolved, was such a terse issue even then that it very nearly tore apart the first Constitutional Congress, there are a couple of things that they couldn’t have seen coming and, had they, may have made the second amendment a great deal different.
The first was the evolution of the firearm. In 1787, there was no way any of them could have possibly seen two key innovations coming: handguns and automatic weapons. While dueling pistols were somewhat fashionable around that time, Samuel Colt was still about fifty years from the first revolver and the gatling gun, the precursor to automatic weapons, was nearly thirty years after that and required multiple people to operate. Either one of those things alone would have terrified the hell out of them, but the concept of a small, easily concealable weapon that could fire seventeen bullets in a matter of seconds with an average effective range of about 50 meters was probably inconceivable, even for the freakishly prescient Ben Franklin.
Back in those days, if you wanted to kill a man, it took some real effort. Drive-bys were much more complicated, for instance. You were only likely to get a couple of shots off before you had to spend a few minutes reloading and/or getting the carriage back under control by calming the horses who were having a perfectly healthy, natural response to a nearby explosion. And even then, your accuracy probably wasn’t all that great. So, rather than bothering with all that, people would resort to the more old-fashioned, up close and personal methods, you know, the ones where you had to look someone in the eye and feel the blood on your hands when you killed them.
The other thing that they couldn’t have seen coming was the evolution of American culture into one completely saturated with ultraviolent imagery. It’s gotten to the point now where science is finding that our brains are literally wired differently here than in other developed nations where violence is still abhorred, rather than glorified. When people from those countries are shown graphically violent acts, even in stills, the parts of their brain that control things like revulsion and terror light up brighter than a Christmas tree. When your average American is shown the same imagery, not only are those places much dimmer, we have a tendency to light up in the same places that we do when we’re sexually aroused.
Yep, that means we literally get turned on by the prospect of enacting violence. Sit and think about that for a second. Now think about the fact that you and your kids are probably wired that way, too. The prevailing theory is that it’s the result of a combination of desensitization, which accounts for the dimmer registers of the revulsion and terror, because we’ve become used to the idea, and some base animal instinct that used to be necessary, way back when, to make it possible to go out and beat small, furry things to death with rocks for food.
What it all breaks down to is that we’ve evolved into a country that not only has the ability to kill someone quickly, cleanly and easily, without having to deal with lots of the conscience-searing issues of killing someone with your bare hands, but also one that’s wired to actively get off on the idea of it.
So where does that leave us? Well, first off, nowadays, every citizen doesn’t need to own a gun in order to prevent foreign invaders from taking over the country, barring some kind of Red Dawn scenario. We’ve got one of the most effective armies in the world to do that for us. Should we be allowed to own them? Of course. There are a lot of people who still provide meat for their families a good part of the year by grabbing their rifles and heading out into the woods, which is most likely what the founding fathers had in mind.
The problem now, though, is that, in typical American fashion, we’ve taken the law and run with it. The sole purpose of a handgun is to shoot not deer or ducks or fish, but other people. The fact that about 75% of the gun-related homicides in the U.S. each year are committed with handguns backs this up pretty well. The same is true of fully-automatic assault rifles because, quite frankly, it’s not only overkill but pretty dangerous to take on a hunting trip, where any good hunter will tell you that a single shot is all you really need to take down your quarry. And before you go bringing up using a handgun to, “put the deer out of its misery,” your rifle does it just as well.
But, they argue, the criminals all have guns and we need our guns to stop their guns. The rest of the world has actually shown that to be untrue. If, as in many of them, you make possession of a handgun an automatic charge of attempted murder, for the above reason, within a relatively short span of time, the criminals won’t have them, either, or, at the very least, the average mugger or meth-head won’t. And, again, if it comes to home defense, your rifle is a hell of a lot more intimidating than a pistol to a would-be burglar. I promise. Plus, it’s way harder for him to sneak it up to and inside your home if it doesn’t tuck under the shirt in the waistband of his pants.
Finally, there’s the old standby line, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” While true, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and, I assure you, to anyone who’s been shot, that distinction isn’t terribly comforting. It’s one of those blame games we play in order to keep from having to face the reality of a situation. Apply it to a couple of other things in your life and see how much sense it makes. Bulldozers don’t dig holes, people do. Sure, true, but good luck digging those holes with just your hands. Frying pans don’t cook eggs, people do. Yep, again, you’re going to have a hell of an issue making those scrambled eggs without that pan.
What it all comes down to is this: while it’s true that a gun is, by itself, a harmless object under most circumstances, it’s a tool that facilitates one thing and one thing only, violence. While you could kill someone quite handily with a bulldozer or a frying pan, those aren’t their sole functions.
With guns, that’s all there is to them and, while it isn’t right to blame the tool for the way it’s used any more than it is to thank the bulldozer for digging the hole, we have to acknowledge, as reasonable, aware people with a pretty clear view of the results that gun control as it exists today isn’t working out very well. What’s perhaps more disturbing is that more than half the gun-related deaths in a given year are self-inflicted. Of the other 45% or so, the majority are accidental discharges.
I stand firmly in the middle, where I do with most things, in that we need to reform and rewrite regulation to take into account the complete and utter short-sighted idiocy of the average citizen. Because, and this is coming from someone who has looked down the barrel of a gun, while the vast majority of people I know who have guns are responsible and safe, I also know a handful of people with whom I would probably be scared to be alone in their home, had they access to a gun. Think about it this way. Why are we willing to trust some countries to have nuclear arms while others, like Iran and North Korea, who are run by leaders shown to be completely batshit crazy and willing to bring the world down around them to make a point, we aren’t? Same deal.
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