Hating Our Children Is Politically Correct

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Second Amendment to the Constitution

What do you love more, your gun(s) (if you have one) or your kids (same note)? Or, on a more abstract basis, guns or kids? In the developed world, with one glaring exception, it is obviously the children, with guns so far back in the litany of priorities that they don’t even figure in. Through decades of ignoring the “well-regulated militia” provision of the Second Amendment, Americans, however, have often built ironclad “rights” to bear arms that allows mass people-killing assault rifles and oversize magazines capable of many, many rounds before reloading, perfect for someone with mass-killing in mind, with limited, where they exist at all, background checks. Open carry laws, rights to bear arms in public in all sorts of inappropriate places exploded as recent laws in too many states.

It’s easier to get a gun, it seems, than to score a kilo of heroin. And it’s mostly legal. 40% of gun sales, effected between private parties and often at gun shows, don’t involve in background checks at all. Mexico is screaming at us, since tons of “legally acquired” guns from the United States are smuggled across the border to enforce the murder-machines called drug cartels down there, where such weapons are clearly illegal. We’re worried about undocumented aliens crossing north; they’re begging us to stop the gun trade south.

Two and a half years after orange-haired James Holmes opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater showing The Dark Knight Riseskilling 12 and injuring 70, a self-righteous GOP-controlled Colorado State Senate (they have a one-vote majority after the last election) has reopened hearings to repeal the more stringent gun-control measures that resulted from that murderous assault (not to mention the 2012 Connecticut Sandy Hook slaughter of 20 children and 6 adults). For those who care, you might want to refer to my November 9^thblog, Americans Love Guns So Much More than Their Children, which lists virtually all of the school-related gun incidents in recent years up to that date. It is a terrifying and unforgivable list, and it includes Sandy Hook victim, 6-year-old Olivia Rose Engel pictured above. But it doesn’t seem to matter to the Republican legislators in Colorado, who clearly favor guns over their children’s lives.

“[The] newly empowered Republicans [in Denver] at the State Capitol are trying to repeal those measures, reviving an emotional debate over gun violence… Once again, the legislature has become a stage for protests and wrenching testimony from families of people cut down by bullets. Lawmakers are sparring over Second Amendment freedoms and public safety, and arguing about the effectiveness of new measures that expanded background checks and reduced the size of ammunition magazines… [M]easures to undo the new background checks and allow legal gun owners to carry concealed handguns without a permit advanced this week after a committee vote split along party lines.” New York Times, February 6^th. 

The National Rifle Association, a powerful gun-manufacturing lobbying machine, keeps its pedal to the metal efforts at repealing just about any piece of gun-restriction legislation – and are still grinning from their long-standing wild success at forbidding any state or federal governmental agency (even the Centers for Disease Control) from maintaining any statistics on gun homicides. They obviously know what those numbers would reveal. And while the Colorado legislation has no chance of surviving passage through the Democratic Assembly, it doesn’t stop morally irresponsible officials from reopening bloodied wounds and rubbing salt in them.

That NRA mantra of “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” not only has been rejected in most of the civilized world, but cannot be supported when someone who is murdered is always killed by a “bad guy,” when that “bad guy” was a “good guy” until he or she pulled the murderous trigger. There isn’t a piece of logic on this planet that can support the notion that more guns in society create fewer homicides. The immorality of extreme gun advocates, starting with the NRA, is staggering.

I’m Peter Dekom, and a plain reading of the Second Amendment cannot remotely be construed to create that morally vapid belief that the Constitution supports the level of gun ownership espoused by the NRA… or the Colorado State Senate.