PlanetZac :: Blog

Nuts About Guns

What's the deal? I'm trying to figure out why the gun nuts have so much power over our government. How is it that this obnoxious minority (bent on protecting American freedoms from a long-dead King of England) continue to sway the decisions of our populace and our congress-people?

The ban on assault rifles has just been lifted and I'm wondering how long it's going to be before I'm shot. Now that manufacturers will be making assault rifles more readily available through legal channels, the amount of weapons available through illegal channels is going to soar. Not only will they be used for "recreational" purposes (more on that later), but every punk kid with a lowrider and a loud stereo system is going to be carrying around an AK-47. Now, all I have to do is cut off the wrong persion in traffic, and pow!

So that brings me to what chemical-propellent weapon enthusiasts call recreation. When I engage in a sport, I do so for the challenge or the reward of conquering things that are against me. When people hunt animals, the challenges they are facing involve many things. Even then, you aren't up against a force that can hurt you, nor are you required to kill the animals for survival (because then it's not recreation anymore). So, why are hunters trying to make hunting easier with more powerful weapons? What on earth crawls into a guy's head and makes him think he needs to kill an animal using a semi-automatic and, now, fully-automatic weapon? As if a high-powered rifle with a long-distance scope wasn't enough of an advantage already. My neck isn't nearly red enough to even begin to understand the allure of target shooting.

Why am I against guns? Well, it's pretty simple...

First of all, I don't believe that guns are the responsible entity for killing people. I understand that a person has to make the decision to kill someone (through whatever means they choose). But, what if someone invented a ray gun that just vaporized a person (ala Star Trek). No mess, very little evidence, and all packed within a rechargeable handheld weapon. Surely anyone who can grasp the logic of extremes understands that as technology makes it easier for a person to kill to another, the occurence of homicide will only increase (especially crimes of passion, which is just as bad as any other kind of killing--someone still dies).

Not only is logic on my side, but empiricle evidence is also helping out. Many European models of gun control have already proven very affective in protecting innocent people from gun fatalities. In fact, it's less common for many law enforcement agencies to outfit their entire force with sidearms (go ask the average bobby in London if he carries a gun to work). The cool part about places like Germany is that you don't give up your recreational privileges--just the red necks with the gun rack in their pickup truck suffer. Many European countries have weapon repositories where weapons are kept during the parts of the year when there's no hunting seasons. Seems to work for a lot of other first-world nations. Oh, but the US is always an exception to the rules of civilized nations.

The last bit of argument I have about guns is that the NRA people are always claiming it's a Constitutional right to have guns. But, who has read the 2nd Amendment? Surely anyone who like guns, must love this amendment. Well, this is the 2nd Amendment:*

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.

Unfortunately, the context is missing in how it's written. So, I tracked it down. The heading of the "Articles of Amendment" says:

PROPOSED BY CONGRESS, AND RATIFIED BY THE LEGISLATURES OF THE SEVERAL STATES, PURSUANT TO THE FIFTH ARTICLE OF THE ORIGINAL CONSTITUTION

So this is a descendent of the Fifth Article of the Constitution. I'll spare you the copy-paste on this one. The Fifth Article states that the federal governing bodies have the ability to amend the Constitution in the future.

So, after you sift through all the grown-up talk, the amendment is read as a proposal. This is a provision requested of the government. It was used as a way to keep the freedom of people squarely in their hands because they had just come from many oppressive governments that quelled any attempt to raise arms against them. It was an insurance policy that was given to the people as a way of saying this new government has no intention of oppressing you through force of military.

So why do chemical-propellent weapon enthusiasts say the Constitution provides them the legal right to own a gun? Well, they read it as two sentences. As it's written in the Constitution, there's only one period in the Second Amendment. The statements therein are not separate, they're linked. This changes the meaning quite a bit. If you can read the last portion of the amendment as a stand-alone sentence, sure, the NRA is right and the Constitution is clearly allowing us all to own guns. But, if you read it in its context, it says that the right to bear arms is a facility of the proposal of allowing a state of the union to maintain a civilian militia. So, taken to the degree of technical detail that everyone wishes was on their side, this amendment says that a state can maintain a militia (a group of civilians trained in combat) that is well regulated. Within these organizational units, the provision allows people to use weapons.

If you're scratching your head right now and getting mad enough to go shoot some holes in the Trans-Am on the front lawn, it's okay. It's a little confusing because a lot of people smarter than any lawyer you'll meet wrote this stuff down. It had to be vague enough to be inclusive of many unforeseen situations, but it had to be strict enough to be effective; not an easy task--even if your IQ is 150 (smarter than your really smart uncle/brother).

So this brings up a very important aspect of studying any kind of rule. This type of analysis is called "framer's intent." For those of us who grew up in America, we have no concept of framer's intent (we have a governmental device called a "Supreme" court that long ago decided framer's intent isn't important). For people in civilized nations, framer's intent is really important. What we mean by "framer's intent" is that we try to put ourselves in the environment and situations of the people who wrote the rule. That way, we can find out what they must have been thinking when they wrote the rule and understand what aspects of our society (or government or whatever) were supposed to be affected by the rule. You might think that this is a way to get around a rule--it's not. It's a way to discover not only what rules are too weak for a given context, but also the limits of rules that should have been worded more severely.

In the example of the Second Amendment, the framer's intent is as clear as the hole in your trailer's screen door: the states that ratified the Second Amendment (as a part of a package called "The Bill of Rights") wanted a blanket to protect them from an oppressive government. If the government formed by the original colonies became too powerful and trampled on individual freedoms, the Second Amendment gave people the ability to legally bear arms against the government. So, if you join your local National Guard and the governor of your home state decides to invade Washington D.C. on the grounds that the government is overly oppressive, you have a Constitutional right to own and bear a gun (and, sure, you can keep the ridiculous uniform).

The arguments for gun ownership seem pretty weak. I don't know what "developed" nation would consider recreation a higher priority than personal safety. Even if you claim it's a right to protect yourself from an oppressive government, who is regulating and organizing you to cause any affect in that area?

This ping-pong gun ownership junk has gone on long enough. Let's try to make our country safer. Let's get Billy-Bob to stop carrying his 12-gauge to the dinner table. I'm moving out of the country and paying taxes to some other, more human-friendly government if this stuff continues.

Please don't shoot,
Zac

* Footnote: If you believe my copy-pasting is in error, please visit this link to read the words as posted by house.gov.

Entered by Zac Hester
Email: zac@planetzac.net, WWW: http://www.planetzac.net