Gun Control

It gets my goat when gun nuts help nuts get guns.

The NRA supports letting nuts get guns. Not that they campaign for this. They simply want unfettered access to guns by anyone who hasn't yet committed a felony. That creates a giant loophole for crazy people. NRA folks demand that we must endure the annual killing spree by one nut or another as the insignificant price a "free" society must pay for this God-given right.

I notice that many of them seem quite alarmed at the thought of imposing a sanity test for gun ownership. Hmmm. You could see that as a libertarian thang. You could also see them resembling that remark...

None of this means I oppose, say, hunters killing deer with rifles. We've eradicated the predators who used to eat deer from much of America, and we have to take up the slack or suffer deer population explosions. Of course those predators took out the sick and the old deer. It would be nice if hunters did likewise. But perhaps that's too much to ask for?

As for the Second Amendment--neither gun nuts nor gun restrictionists are williing to concede that the 2nd Amendment isn't perfectly clear today about what it says. If you review hundreds of years of legal opinions and discussions of this amendment, the only thing that's really clear is that even the most learned legal scholars are divided about its meaning.

It also matters whether you're a so-called textualist, strict constructionist, or liberal interpreter of the Constitution. I've observed that very few citizens or even jurists are any one of these things consistently, however. Most are strict about the other side's laws and liberal about their own. Just as the Republican Party favored states rights until it gained control of all three branches of the federal government. After that we got an unending stream of Big Brother laws and actions.

Most who favor unfettered gun access describe themselves as strict constructionists and insist on hewing to the intent of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution.

Let's apply this test to the 2nd Amendment. At the time it was ratified "arms" meant "flintlocks." It takes about two minutes to fire a flintlock, reload it, and fire it again. Power and accuracy were limited.

Okay, let's give every American unfettered access to flintlock muskets.

There's also that messy language about state militias, which about half the scholars interpret as making this amendment about state militias, thus limiting gun ownership to militia members.

As far as I can tell no amount of legal wrangling will resolve this. Whatever the founders meant by this entire sentence is smiply lost to us.

Therefore I submit that the only way to clarify the 2nd Amendment is to write a new amendment that makes it perfectly clear. The congressional debate that ensued would be edifying, wouldn't it?

Because as it stands you could easily interpret "arms" in the liberal construction the NRA demands is the only one to include any firearm a man can pick up. Shoulder-mounted stingers that can down a 747. SAW machine guns that can mow down people by the hundreds. RPGs that can disable an Abrams tank. 50 cal. sniper rifles that can put a big hole through a man's chest half a mile away.

If "arms" doesn't mean what the founders meant--and there's no disputing what "arms" meant then--and if you're a strict constructionist, you must advocate banning all arms but flintlocks. If you think it involves everything I mentioned you're a gun nut and favor the most liberal construction of the Constitution imaginable. But even the NRA doesn't advocate that (though it certainly supports assault rifles, whose possessors could overmatch a company of the Kings Regulars in revolutionary times). The NRA favors treating the Constitution as a living document that allows reasonable reinterpretations of the meaning of its text, by its lights. So we get a very mild form of gun control.

Most Americans favor a slightly more constructionist slant, starting with forbidding crazy people from legally possessing firearms--and making sure info about who's nuts get where it needs to go, as was not the case in Virginia--and banning all rapid-fire weapons, especially assault rifles.

Very few advocate banning guns in toto. And nearly all of us favor making it a felony for a felon to possess a gun.

So honestly the gun control debate is really between those who all favor some degree of gun control and some degree of gun ownership freedom. We simply dispute the degrees. So let's have no more canards like "when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns."

And do let's look at what other nations have done about gun control, and consider the results of the different policies. We aren't alone on this planet, much as some of us would like to be. Maybe someone who isn't American has a good idea about this. Why not at least find out?