I’ve been here before. We’ve all been here before. Students shot and killed by a classmate. A politician and supporters shot by just another nut with a gun. A teenager killed for dressing like Bill Belichick. A police chief killed in a drug bust gone wrong. No matter the circumstance, the voices defending guns and the law abiding citizens who possess them rise in chorus to a largely empty public square. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it’s no match for an M-16.
Amendment II
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.
My reading of the Second Amendment is that it was all about allaying the fears of those in the newly formed nation who supported state’s rights and feared they might have exchanged the tyranny of a king for the tyranny of a central, federal government. The states would be allowed to have a militia of citizen-soldiers to maintain their security. Rather than an open-ended endorsement of gun ownership, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is tied directly to the state militia.
Granted, it is a remarkably tortured sentence that opens itself to interpretation, but I would argue that if we are to proffer the Second Amendment as a defense for gun ownership, we cannot simply reduce it to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” I would argue – granting the rather fractured structure of the sentence – that it is a “well regulated Militia” that “shall not be infringed.” The right to keep and bear arms is an antecedent, an operational necessity for a militia in 1789.
The Second Amendment is an antique and has been since the Civil War. The notion that the states and their militias could stay the power of the federal government ended in 1865. No doubt the debate over states’ rights and the role of the federal government continue to this day but it does so without the Army of the Potomac arrayed against the Army of Northern Virginia to settle matters. Ideas, not bullets, should win arguments. That’s a good thing. It’s an especially good thing for the man who loses the argument.
Ultimately, the issue is not the Second Amendment, regardless of your interpretation of it. The issue is our almost obsessive love of guns here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We’re pistol-packing Christians who think Jesus would be more concerned with the estate tax than he would be with capital punishment. And he would definitely be rockin’ a concealed Colt .45 service pistol in his robes if the Second Coming was in progress.
No good facing the Anti-Christ empty handed, am I right?
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