Second Amendment

A toddler shot his mother at a national retailer and we now have a tidal wave of name calling and finger pointing. Social media pages are exploding with voluminous narrow-minded comments, likes and retweets of simplistic arguments and defenses surrounding the second amendment and the right to bear arms. Like most emotionally charged arguments the connection between causation and correlation is lost as little nuance permeates the bombastic chatter.

Does it matter that this mother was a gun advocate except to state the truism that those who advocate an individual right for guns are surely more likely to have them in their possession? Or is there any real basis to claim that this mother made no error and that this event was simply an accident? The clear lens of hindsight, as well as reasonable foresight, gives us the chance to imagine numerous steps that would have prevented this mother’s death.

Perhaps we forget that our primary laws do discuss the question of firearms and they also direct Congress on its proper roles for legislation.

Article I Section 8 of our Constitution provides that “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for the general welfare of the United States;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . ..”

Because our framers saw the potential for power misused, they added the Second 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.” It seems clear, and the Supreme Court concurs, that to the extent that the government can  subject its citizens by force, those same citizens need to possess the ability to respond to that threat.

Call me naive, but our history shows we have minimal risk that our government will subject us by force of arms. It also seems contrary to our “general welfare” to have citizens equally armed as our national forces or our “regulated militia.” The question of how to define the boundaries between an unlimited right to bear arms on one extreme and the equally unconstitutional premise that the Congress should ban all individual firearm ownership, requires civil, thoughtful and ongoing discussion.

Let us avoid the hostilities that come from angry debate and remember that when we talk about the government and its laws we are talking about us, “We the People.” We should not portray those who see their right to bear arms as fundamental as backwood, ignorant, unsympathetic characters who will hold onto their guns until they are pried from their “cold, dead hands.” Nor should those who want measured firearm legislation be ridiculed as bleeding-heart liberals.

While I don’t know precisely where to draw the line, I sincerely hope that we can reasonably talk with, instead of at, each other.