It’s obvious, isn’t it? There are too many guns in this country.
A gun is a fairly simple machine, and the operative parts are made of metal, so once it is built, it lasts. Find a gun that has been sitting in the basement for a century, spend at most a few hours cleaning it, and it will probably work just fine.
You build ‘em, and they pile up. And in the last five years alone, American gun manufacturers have built 37 million of these simple machines.
A small child can tell this is wrong, and a real problem. But in the other corner is . . . the Bill of Rights, a brilliant piece of work that is, properly, an object of veneration to Americans. It has remained sacrosanct for the two and a quarter centuries since its passage, and many civil libertarians rightly fear that once it is messed with, a precedent will have been set for it to be messed with again.
I wish I had a good answer for those civil libertarians. But I’m sorry, we’re just going to have to mess with the Second Amendment if it stands in the way of reducing the size of that mountain of guns in the U.S., because that problem clearly is only going to get worse as the nation becomes more populous and the mountain climbs steadily toward the sun.
The Bill of Rights as a whole is a visionary document that should live forever, so long as humans gather together and form societies and create culture. The Second Amendment, however, is grossly outmoded. The right it seeks to protect is the right of an armed citizenry to rise up against an oppressive government.
Now that the oppressive government has all the modern military toys it has that right doesn’t exist any longer. After all, the courts have universally agreed that the populace does not have the right to be armed with military hardware such as artillery, rockets, bombs and nuclear, biologic and chemical weapons, and how could they not? Otherwise we would all be dead soon.
In other words, the reason there are more guns than people in the U.S. is because of a Constitutional amendment founded on a theory which is itself based on a set of facts that is undeniably extinct. That amendment needs to be extinct, as well. The Constitution was really not intended as a suicide pact. When a provision that was created for salutary purposes becomes an instrument of mass death because facts have changed, you just have to go with the facts.
WE MUST ACT. So we might as well nut up and admit it. Yes, folks, we’re coming after your guns.
I’m not proposing a specific plan. I’ve got nothing against sporting uses of firearms, if someone can devise a workable plan that does the necessary while protecting those uses. But what’s necessary is to greatly reduce the number of guns in the U.S. This must be done, “sporting uses” be damned, because “sporting uses” of firearms in a modern society are truly insignificant compared to the impact of guns on our society.
Anybody who needs guns for food can be helped. We’ll help you, but sorry, we have to take your gun in exchange.
It’s not just the death toll. It’s the terror toll. It’s the fear of gathering in public, enclosed places that makes us just stay at home. The fear that makes us buy our own firearms for stashing at home — where they are more likely to kill us in a cleaning accident or a fit of domestic rage than to protect us from outside harm.
Its 24-year-old new teachers having to run shooter drills so their 7-year-olds will know what to do when it happens here.
This cannot stand. The numbers have to go down. The wrong types of firearms, owned for the wrong reasons, must be illegal — and if this ultimately means all firearms, so be it.
But, but, but . . . if guns are outlawed, blah blah blah! Or put a little more reasonably, there are obviously severe practical problems with trying to legislate 300 million present firearms out of existence. We can’t possibly find them all, even if we go house to house (which we won’t), and there is just undeniably going to be a period where gun ownership among criminals hasn’t changed as much as gun ownership among the law-abiding.
There is an obvious flaw in that argument, though: it is self-perpetuating. If you don’t curtail guns now because it will be too hard, you have to admit it will be even harder 10 years from now when there are even more guns to curtail, harder yet 20 years from now, etc. I have to say, I remember saying exactly the same thing half a century ago, sitting around a cafeteria table with a bunch of other 4th-graders.
But that’s how badly we are cowed by the NRA and the gun industry, how even our thinking is battered. We give in to problems and arguments that even a 4th-grader can demolish. Yeah, it will be a lot harder to solve this problem now than it would’ve been a half-century ago, but I for one have no curiosity at all to see how much worse it will get if we allow another half-century to pass while doing virtually nothing about it. Because you know it and I know it, it will get a lot worse.
More people all the time, more crazies all the time, more guns all the time. That’s what we’re looking at. We have to stop it.
It won’t be easy to get rid of guns. But first thing, we’ll stop making millions of new ones. At first they’re just illegal, and anyone can turn them in to a proper center and receive some reasonable amount of compensation. Over time, criminal penalties for possession will roll in. Eventually, those penalties will become severe. And when guns are seized, they will be destroyed.
You may never get rid of all of them, but beyond any doubt, the numbers would go down fairly significantly in a fairly short period of time and would continue to decline thereafter. That beats the holy hell out of the current situation, where the numbers continue to skyrocket.
Let’s turn it around. We’ve already waited too long. Every day we wait makes the problem worse.