Cities, Countryside, Tradition and the Second Amendment

There are parts of big cities where Glocks, AR-15s and big fat magazines are all over the neighborhood… or should I say the “hood.” In Chicago and Detroit, northern towns to the max, murder rates are soaring. Major cities are places where people rub shoulders, crowding their way to work or even the local store. More people, tight spaces, more human flow and interaction, add frustration with a touch of anger, and you get yelling, the middle finger and some form of confrontation. Where weapons proliferate and gangs prosper, revenge and duty add new levels of danger to this world.

Let’s add more guns to the mix. Let’s encourage city people to buy more weapons and carry them on their person. Let’s allow simple anger, rising to rage on occasion, to go from middle finger expressions to those emotional peaks that happen all-too-often where the passion of the moment, perhaps heighted with alcohol or some lovely narcotic, self-control minimized by emotion, and let the forefinger now express itself on the trigger of a gun. Let’s allow guns to proliferate throughout cities, keeping background checks between private sellers off the books (40% of guns sales fit this category, by the way) and simply assume that guns will only find their way to sane, responsible adults. We all know what really happens. We hear it on the news all the time.

Now let’s go to the rural parts of America, or those towns (common in Texas, for example) where rural values still define contemporary life. We teach the young ‘uns to hunt and fish, to defend home and church with pride and to consider skill with a weapon one of the basic rights of passage, a system that has lasted generations, passed from father and mother to son and daughter for as long as anyone can remember.

Let’s add an extremely well-funded organization – the National Rifle Association – that has never remotely adequately explained the first half of the Second Amendment – that “well-regulated” part – and focused almost entirely on a raw and unrestricted right to bear arms. But this deeply-respected organization has sold their rather obviously inadequate explanation of the Second Amendment to just about everyone in the GOP and a whole pile of folks who call themselves Democrats. Not as a talking point, but with a passionate commitment that borders on religious fervor, where logic and a need to keep us safe in our ordinary lives need not be considered.

In the early 19^th century, the United States was, for the most part, a nation that was defined by rural values and recently struggled in revolution against a British oppressor. As the years passed, the Supreme Court upheld the kinds of restrictions on arms that would keep someone from having a private nuclear arsenal loaded onto attack fighters purchased in the open arms market. In the Reagan era, after an assassination attempt, the Brady Law added restrictions to gun ownership… common sense if you will. But saving lives and applying common sense to weapons is not part of rural values, and even the NRA leadership has told us that having assault weapons is our insurance to allow us to overthrow the government if they repress us too much.

It is religion, if you listen to those involved. On Saturday, October 19^th, a rather large and well-armed bevy of gun owners rallied in America’s seventh largest city, San Antonio and took their loud but peaceful protests in favor of gun ownership to the Alamo (pictured above, taken by Pat Dollard). “For tourists, it was a startling sight: men, women and children openly carrying loaded and unloaded shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s as if they were purses or backpacks. A young man in jeans ate a breakfast sandwich with his assault rifle resting behind his back. A rally speaker with his own assault rifle confronted and quizzed police officials about their views of the Second Amendment, and the officials calmly looked on.

“Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, teenagers and retirees all had their guns out, as visitors to San Antonio came and went from the Alamo. Police officers monitored and filmed the rally from a building across the street… Demonstrators were exercising a little-known privilege of Texas gun culture; Texas law allows people to walk down the street with an assault rifle, shotgun or other type of long gun. A state-issued license is required to carry a concealed handgun.”

Picture the same rally in Battery Park in New York City or in a park in Beverly Hills. Doesn’t fit, right? Detroit and Chicago? And that’s the point. Almost every developed nation on earth thinks our gun laws are completely out of step with the 21^st century, that we have mass murders, serial killers and death row filled with perpetrators of homicide-by-gun of every motivation simply because we are gun crazy. Some stood their ground badly.

We all know that Congress can impose additional limits and restrictions on these machines designed solely to kill people… but we won’t. It’s time to recognize that our gun culture is no longer tenable as currently constituted, but I think a few thousand more innocents will have to die before anyone cares. If Sandy Hook can be ignored rather completely, punctuated by Aurora, it’s gonna be a very, very long time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I understand there is a legitimate place for guns in society, where is the amendment protecting me and my family from a saturation of guns that can easily be used on us?