A 50 year plan: Second Amendment

It’s 4:00 Friday afternoon as I write this for a Saturday posting. I actually started writing this earlier this week (Monday night) and had planned on writing this particular “50 year plan” chapter well before this week’s events ensued. (This is the 9th of 15 planned chapters, give or take.)

But after calling in to John Robinson’s radio show today, incensed that he felt the Constitution was a “living document”, I figured I better place a little bit of background in front of the actual article. Despite his protestation, the Second Amendment is not “dead”; however, layer upon layer of federal gun laws need to be stripped in order to bring it back to health. This is the point of my post today, and I think it serves to revise and extend my remarks from Friday.

It’s only judges that make the Constitution “living and breathing”, regardless of what history professors might say. Now, I had some ideas on how I’d improve the Constitution way back at the start of monoblogue, that post is here. Repealing the Second Amendment wasn’t among them.

Here’s what I originally wrote this week.

I’m writing this chapter of the 50 year plan after the terrible events in Virginia, as a gunman snuffed out over 30 lives before his was taken on the Virginia Tech campus.

Predictably, the knee-jerk reaction from the left is, “we need more gun laws!” The sad fact is that no gun law would have prevented what happened. The gunman decided that his was the way to solve those personal problems he had. People in that mindset to do damage to society will use whatever means they deem necessary. Not only that, the gunman bought his gun legally. It turned out to be the last legal thing he did insofar as gun ownership was concerned, as the serial numbers on both his guns were filed down. Moreover, Virginia Tech’s campus was declared a “gun-free zone” so the moment he entered campus with his weapon he violated another of many laws.

The way I see it, the Second Amendment was placed in the Constitution because people having weapons would be able to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Having broken away from a monarchy to establish what they hoped would be a truly republican government, they worried about the reestablishment of oppression by a future society – thus, they decided that people should have the right to bear arms. It was “necessary to the security of a free state.”

Some say that the Second Amendment only covers people in a “well regulated militia”, which they interpret as being in the National Guard or a like organization. However, National Guards didn’t come into being until the twentieth century. And that’s not the important part of the sentence. The Second Amendment is sort of unique in that the militia language is descriptive rather than prohibitive. It could have been just as effective without the sentence, just reading “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Let’s go back to Virginia for another example. As states go, Virginia is one of the least restrictive as far as acquiring a weapon which is their perfect right under the Tenth Amendment. Other states make citizens jump through hoops to get a gun, and that’s also acceptable in the eyes of the Constitution.

The main objection I have to the current situation, and the change that should guide policy in the next fifty years, is working to eliminate the federal gun laws. Just as the Constitution says, Congress shall make no law restricting the right we have to bear arms. However, pages and pages of the federal code deal with guns of all sorts.

I’m certain some read this and think I’m trying to resurrect the wild, wild west. But my point is simple – laws that deal with guns (and a lot of other subjects too, guns just being the subject of this short tome) should be established by the individual states. If a state wants to disarm their populace and leave the weapons to the hands of the criminal element, well, that’s their right. It would also be the surviving public’s right to throw those fools out of office who encouraged the situation by being a legislature full of gun grabbers.

On the other hand, states that show respect to their citizens by allowing them concealed carry and fewer restrictions on the number and type of guns they can possess are generally rewarded by lower crime rates. Imagine if even just 1 out of 100 students or faculty at Virginia Tech carried a weapon – there may still have been a number of deaths, but it may have been limited to the number Cho Seung-Hui could kill before someone else with a gun could have struck him down. (The guy was pretty clever, though, chaining the classroom doors closed before mowing down his victims.)

One final note – while I’m a supporter of people being able to keep whichever weapon they choose, they also should be properly trained in how to use them. Just like people have to take training to drive an automobile (which can also be a lethal weapon in the wrong hands), people should be trained on using and given an opportunity to gain respect for this powerful weapon.

Perhaps this respect for a possible tool for ending a life could carry over into respect for life in general.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

4 thoughts on “A 50 year plan: Second Amendment”

  1. Why are you wasting time on what John Robinson says, especially about the Constitution, when Barrie Tilghman is trying to get her new puppet (“Louweasel”) to kill Salisbury’s tax cap?

  2. the revenue cap will be history as soon as the powers that be can trash it… they spent previous years trying to circumvent it and now the general assembly will give them the opportunity to dissove it… for the good of the county and city residents…

    teeman

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