Fearing Fathers

I don't like guns. I don't hate guns. I own guns for home defense but have also been required to carry one professionally. I know how to use my gun and how it feels to fire it, it was never a leisure activity for me to practice firing my weapon at a shooting range but instead was rooted in the belief that if you are going to own a gun you need to fully understand how to use it. It is my hope that I will never have to use my gun for it's purpose, which, make no mistake, is to kill a criminal intent on killing me. During 2017 there were three occasions when persons unknown attempted to beat down my front door in the middle of the night and I live in a rural area. Each time I yelled to the miscreants on the other side of the door that a 357 was aimed directly at them. They ceased and fled. I'm convinced the two last incidents were stupid teenagers playing games but it is the first incident that bothers me the most because that one was no doubt an attempted home invasion. Any criminal that enters your home knowing you're there is going to hurt you and a baseball bat is handy but a .357 magnum is better and I take no pleasure from that fact.

I related my personal story to emphasize the complexity of the gun issue in the United States. I want to have the ability to own a gun or guns for the purpose of self protection in my home. For that purpose a pistol or pump shotgun does the job, hunters should also be able to have rifles suited to that goal but beyond that all assault weapons should be illegal as well as all the devices which circumvent the law. Such devices as bumpstocks, remember that word from Las Vegas, the site of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history? Nothing was done to get rid of them at the time but now President Trump says he's going to do something about it through the Justice Department, I don't believe him but we'll see. It is Congress that should act and should have acted after Las Vegas with simple language, "bumpstocks are hereby outlawed." Congress can accomplish one issue up or down votes when it wishes. It hasn't wished to after any of the mass shootings of the last twenty years. We had an assault rifle ban in this country and the Republic did not fall. The law simply expired and that should never have been allowed to happen. The AR15 which was just used less than two weeks ago at a Florida High School should never have been in the shooters hands.

Each time we have a mass shooting we are told, now is not the time to discuss gun laws, we need to gather facts and grieve. Then we do nothing because that's what the N.R.A. wants. The N.R.A is not the voice of it's members and if they all dropped their membership simultaneously, the N.R.A. would still exist because it is the lobbying arm of the gun manufacturering industry which wants no changes to our law and happily exploits the continuing misunderstanding of the Second Amendment.

Now comes the part where some get angry. How much do you really know about the history of the founding of our country, beyond elementary and high school? That's not a knock on you. Life is tough and surviving takes up a lot of time but it's incumbent upon all of us to continue informing ourselves our entire lives, not just on current affairs but also on history. The Second Amendment does not grant a right for individual citizens to own any gun we want. The Amendment speaks specifically about a State's right to maintain a "well regulated militia" thus allowing the right of the States to "keep and bare arms." Many of the founding fathers were concerned about a centralized federal government being able to raise armies and potentially inflict tyranny upon the individual States through force of arms. This does not preclude individual States from determining their approach to gun regulation and they do.

The Federal Government does and always has limited our "right" to own weapons. You can't own  functioning tanks or missiles in your front yard. Assault weapons are for the purpose of quickly shredding human beings, they are weapons of war and we are not allowed to own a wide variety of those. The Heller Case of 2008 in the U.S. Supreme Court does not grant unfettered right to gun ownership, it speaks to handguns and even Justice Antonin Scalia made it clear that we do not have a blanket right to every weapon we want.

Americans are not more violent than any other nationality on the planet, but we have greater access to devastating weapons with which to express the madness that dwells within humanity as a whole. It is long past time that we bring an end to this.

In this most recent shooting we once again see the attempt to frame this as a mental health issue, but it isn't. Statistically it is the mentally ill who are more likely to be the victims of violence as opposed to being the perpetrators. The shooter in Las Vegas had absolutely nothing to indicate a history of mental illness. The shooter in Florida appears to have been disturbed but that's a big difference from being mentally ill. He was sound enough to make a plan and exit the building with the victims to attempt an escape. Today Donald Trump said we need to bring back Mental Institutions. He glibly reflected on remembering when we had lots of them to put people, but then we shut them down, "New York had a bunch of them." He is an ignorant man with no concept of what America did to it's mentally ill citizens in those institutions and the number of people who were locked away in them for no good reason except convenience. They were shut down because they were snake pits. Who Mr. President will pay for your new institutions? You and your fellow Congressional Republicans are busy gutting social programs including those related to mental illness. You speak with forked toungue.

The President also says the N.R.A. wants to do something about gun control, ah! What a ridiculous statement from any President of the United States. The N.R.A. should be irrelevant, he's supposed to lead! That organization wants nothing meaningful done about addressing this national stupidity. It's about dollars and cents for them, the body count is irrelevant.

We can reduce the catastrophic results of these shootings through common sense laws and actually understanding what our Constitution says as opposed to lazily accepting the propaganda of the pied pipers of death building their fortunes on the misery of others.