Examining The Gun Control vs. Gun Rights Debate In Times Of Chaos & Uncertainty
April 8th 2009 08:28
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 Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution
~Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution
In this month of April, we are forced to celebrate many anniversaries in the log of American history.
These anniversaries aren’t told with reverence of brave men and women who gave all they had for the freedom of others. Nor are they milestones of broken glass ceilings or Supreme Court Rulings, but simply fall under the category of dark acts that show the lowest depths of our society.
When the subjects of the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings emerge in casual conversation, a deep sadness creeps into the depths of our souls. This sadness is corrosive and far reaching, sending each and every one of us as individuals on a journey to find out how a government system as great as the one created by our forefathers could allow tragedies like this to occur.
Each and every year, our fingers as a society fall to the simplest answer as we cope with the pain of blaming the instrument that caused the destruction instead of the outside factors of the men controlling the weapon.
From the beginning of time, we have fallen back on our lesser instincts as a society when it comes to issues of conflict resolution. Instruments of violence have taken the form of sticks, stones, words and our bare fists in times of peril as well as jubilation.
Weapons in our natural environment as well as man-made tools like the gun have been used for both self-defense as well as the commission of crimes dating back centuries before the bible was even penned.
This is not a new argument, nor will it ever reach a practical solution in a power struggle.
The problem has never been about one side wanting to keep criminals armed in an effort to make profits, but have fallen squarely into an issue of not being able to find a balance between the extremes of black and white.
The extremes that want to focus on the culture of hunting instead of having in depth discussions about the final determining factors of gun ownership outside of criminal records.
The hunting culture is a return to the fundamentals of our society that gives us nothing but uncertainty in the safety of our food supply, while the rules are shady at best as to who is considered mentally ill and unfit to receive the rights guaranteed to them in the Second Amendment.
The fight over the extremes of the issue has allowed those unbalanced citizens who have been psychologically determined unfit to own a weapon, for the safety of others, to slip through the cracks while the semantics of interpretation over the Second Amendment is fought over at the highest levels in our government.
The Second Amendment clearly states that each and every American has the unalienable right to bear arms. While this clear and concise statement has been mangled and reinterpreted through the years for one or another’s political gain, our Supreme Court has upheld this right consistently throughout our country’s existence.
With the fact of a man or woman having the right to protect his or her family being firmly established, what we need to do is find a way to balance this right with the dangers of a modern society.
The danger of terrorists both home and abroad living among us, the easy access to guns on the black market, loop holes in our current system of checks and balances and the realities of crime in every neighborhood from sea to shining sea.
In reality, we could make the moves to reinvent the Supreme Court to work against the will of the Constitution and pass laws to ban guns, but the only result of this would be in a creation of a black market much like we had during prohibition and currently have because of the effects of the “War on Drugs”.
Guns are never going away and aren’t the problem we should be focusing on. What we should focus on is working together to locate the ticking time bombs before they go off and making sure that criminal-minded individuals don’t get access to weapons.
Instead of working together, we choose to fight. We fight to keep the mythical liberal from storming in our homes and forcibly taking away our guns and fight the mythical conservative monster from putting guns in the hands of our kids and the gangster down the street.
Both arguments are irrational at best, but could easily become realities if we continue these wars of control in our highest levels of government. One man’s easy solution can become another man’s nightmare in times of crisis as we stretch our hands out for the easy and quick ways to comfortability.
We have a problem with violence and this is a fact that can’t be argued against in any court of law, church or American home. It’s hard to tear down an undeniable fact, but what we need for this grave problem is a solution on a national and state level to protect us from ourselves.
If there’s one thing we can get out of this time of crisis, my hope is for us to look back at the rush to judgment after the Columbine and Virginia Tech tragedies in looking for an outright ban on guns and seeing how it ultimately did nothing to prevent the tragedies we continue to witness.
Working together to pass sensible bills that will hold up on a Constitutional level is the only answer to our problems.
Until we truly put down our pitch forks after every tragedy and come to table of sensibility to work out a better way of solving our problems, we will have to continue to keep adding new anniversaries and reasons to hold more dates in infamy.
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Comment by Anonymous
What I mean to say is that today's problem isn't unique to our country, nor times, nor weapons, and we shouldn't be so quick to react as if we're in such an enlightened age that we can usurp the constitution and enforce radical amendments without consideration for past generations, who withstood the temptation to do so, and future generations who have yet to develop an opinion. The protection of the rights and interest of the minority is always a greater good (or possibly lessor evil) than any progressive mandate to create a great society for obvious reasons. It is the perpetual conservation of the constitution that ensures that chaos is subdued by certainty.
Comment by Khalfani King
Politics and Culture
Khalfani King
Oldies but Goodies From Campaign 08
Our forfathers were men enlightened beyond the chaos of their time and set forth a road map for us to succeed as a nation.
Any notion to gloss over the fundamentals that gave us the freedoms we enjoy as American citizens will simply lead us into the pitfalls they clearly guarded us against when penning the Amendements to the Bill of Rights...
Comment by Johnny Come Lately
Jack's Back
Yes we have had shootings, usually with illegal weapons but the rate dropped dramatically.
I think your consitution is outdated and in light of the horrific numbers of shooting in the US it should be amended. Guns may not kill people, it's the people weilding them that do, but if you make it more difficult to access weapons, especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons which have no place outside of the armed forces, I think it would make a huge difference to the safety of the citizens.
Comment by Khalfani King
Politics and Culture
Khalfani King
Oldies but Goodies From Campaign 08
The problem with calling any document out dated that doesn't apply to your own lifestyle, losing doesn't put anything at stake for you personally and has withstood the test of time for 222 years with only one thwarted attempt at domestic insurrection is not looking at the big picture.
Our country has survived slavery, Jim Crowe, a women's right movement and other various forms of oppressions all with the right to bear arm's in tact and no major bood shed on the streets in racial or societal war fare all because we have these freedoms.
Our legal system is what gives us the balance because every American citizen knows they have vast legal recourse to solve problems and are fully vested in our government.
Instead of inciting violence on the streets for our causes we use the unalienable rights given to us by our forfathers to solve problems...
I believe the gun violence you speak of is based around criminal intent. Criminals will always have guns and any society that bans guns will only find themselves fighting the battle in an upward climb as they now have to fight the criminals as well as the law abiding citizen who now have to harbor weapons to protect what's theirs from corruption within the legal system as well as other men...
The ban on guns is working in Australia and I say good for you but one thing history has taught us is the fact that what's good for one country or region may not be good for another.
We have enough problems with violence as it is and tipping the balance will only lead to a societal explosion our framers set forth for us to avoid.
What we need is to drop our banners and come to a place in the middle that isn't calling for an outright ban on guns or an outright allowance of any gun, anywhere, anytime and pass sensible laws that reach sensible conclusions for the betterment of our society...
Comment by Anonymous
But what you can do is look at the people who are using the guns. Binghamton was an immigrant who had problems assimilating and getting employment. States should be encouraged to come up with more effective job training programs that are funded on merit or something.
Virginia Tech, exchange student. If schools encourage exchange programs with countries not alike to ours, they should have hands-on case managers to ease kids into the culture shock and so many other things.
__ % of convicts are repeat, violent offenders. Bring back the GED program and college level courses for inmates. Improve vocational training programs. Encourage community employers to hire the best of the bunch, and award them grants or subsidies for doing so.
It ain't the guns that’s the constant problem. If you take the guns out of the equation, it will just be substituted by something else.
You can't cure social ills by revoking my rights. pffft!
Comment by Khalfani King
Politics and Culture
Khalfani King
Oldies but Goodies From Campaign 08
Sensible solutions means not walking into peoples homes and taking away there means of protection and also simultaneously making regulations so Jay Ray isn't hunting Bambi with Semi Automatic weapons...
Sensible solutions means when Jane Doe says she's gonna blow up the school it shoots through the system and is documented so she can't go to Wally World and load up on weapons to do exactly what she said she would do to her psychiatrist...
I could continue to load up on examples for you to illustrate my points again and again but we have common sense and these things can be placed into balanced laws if we just open our minds enough to listen to the other side instead of waging wars where there are only winners and losers...