Our Constitutional Freedoms

I have written before that I am a cynic. I do not hold much hope for the continued success of mankind to thrive and survive over the course of the next millennia. As mankind moves forward our continued lack of respect for other life forms and our lack of respect for each other has us spiraling out of control, especially in the United States where due to our cultural heritage, we turn more and more toward gun violence and justify our ownership as a constitutional right.

Since December 14 I’ve been thinking of all the reasons why anyone who wants to own a gun, should own a gun.  Listed below are some of the reasons I can think of and then my musings on that reason.

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.’  Ratified in 1791 by the citizens of a newly formed country most of whom had suffered under persecution in one form or another.  These citizens were extremely sensitive to the overt power of individuals who held themselves above the common man and felt it was their supreme right/duty to control and misuse humans as they saw fit.  It is no wonder that the citizens of this newly formed country wanted/needed to keep and bear arms.  They of course carried arms that were for the most part equivalent in fire power to of their foreign enemies and were far superior to the weaponry of the natives of this new country.

They did not face a government whose weapons technology was far superior to their own.  Today a confrontation between the US Government and any individual as in the April 19, 1993 Wacco, Texas confrontation between David Koresh and his following and the ATF is woefully out-classed.  Few if any individuals have the fire power to stand up against robotic drones that can drop missiles, armor plated hummers, jet fighters and surveillance equipment such as the US government uses.

So is it logical to argue that individuals need to bear arms to protect themselves from hostile governments?  The second amendment may make it legal, but how practical is it…really?

Self-Protection – I have lived for 64 years and to date I have never needed a gun to protect myself.  That is not to say that there are not those who have successfully used a gun for self-protection.  On rare occasions you hear such a story.  But I would love to see comparative statistics of situations where there is successful self-protection via a gun and then the stats on those instances where the weapon is turned on the owner.  The stories you hear more often are the drive by shootings, the robberies, the home invasions, etc., etc.  I would argue that those situations develop so quickly and so randomly that the person with a legal, concealed carry weapon simply does not have the experience or the reflexes to react quickly enough to self-defend.  

And personally, I am very nervous at the thought of all those people out there who are legally carrying weapons.  What happens when that person has a little too much to drink and gets into an argument over some trivial thing?  What happens when the person flies into a fit of road rage and decides to pull their weapon?  What happens when a child finds that weapon in a purse or a pocket and manages to fire the gun?

Someone do for me, please, the math that draws up the ratio between the occurrence of needing a weapon for self-defense vs the times guns are used in crimes.  I suspect the ratio would weigh heavily in the direction of crime.  

I rather like the story of the woman in Colorado who was legally growing medical marijuana; it is how she supports her family.  She was the victim of a home invasion attempt where 14 men tried to storm her home in order to steal her plants.  She self-defended…with bear spray.  No one was killed.  The home invasion attempt was successfully foiled.  

Hunting – I grew up with a father who in part provided for his family via a few deer, rabbits and squirrels for our evening meals.  I don’t remember that he hunted in his later years, but I do remember as a small child his hunting exploits that were at times quite exciting…like the time a squirrel wasn’t actually dead and managed to tear through our kitchen before Dad did the deed.  

I can appreciate hunting for subsistence sake.  What I can’t abide by is hunting for the sheer joy of killing animals…..  all and any animals.  It is one thing to eat what you kill, it is something entirely different to kill for the sake of your ego.  

I have friends who have freezers so full of dead animals that they cannot possibly eat it all in their life time.  Most of what fills their freezers will have to be thrown away because you can only freeze meat for so long. And yet he continues to hunt under the auspices of subsistence hunting.  He hunts every day during duck season, kills more ducks than he will ever eat, especially given that his wife is a vegetarian, and laments the declining numbers of ducks available to kill, looking to other duck hunters as the problem.  

Given that most game animal numbers are on the decline and some species are actually on endangered lists, how much sense does it make to continue the ‘sport’ of hunting?  For very specific species that within our culture we eat, like deer, which will unlikely ever find itself as a species on the endangered lists, hunting appears legitimate.  Beyond such game, there simply is no reason for hunting.

Sport Shooting – Sport shooting is a sport I do not get.  I don’t understand the thrill of lining up myself to a target and pulling a trigger and rejoicing or not over the results.  It is hard for me to speak to since I don’t get it.  However, if sport shooting at target ranges must persist, then I agree with the child from Newtown, CT who suggested that all the guns be kept by the establishment and participants use those guns for their sport…no need for them to ever leave the business.

You see, my observation of people who conceal carry makes me nervous.  Recently a family member posted a photo of her ‘New Toy’ a 40 caliber Beretta.  Toy??  That mentality demonstrates a profound lack of respect for something that is not a Toy but very much a Weapon.  And this, from a woman who has small children in her home all the time and also owns and operates a child care business.  Her response when I expressed my concerns was ‘Whatever.’  I suspect that she is more representative of concealed carry persons than I care to know.

So where to go from here?  I have no aspirations that anything significant will come of gun control.  Whether the government is successful with gun control or not, guns will continue to flourish in our culture.  We will in time turn our schools into facilities that more readily resemble prison facilities with armed guards everywhere.  Our children will not have the experience that I had as a child of learning in an environment that is free from fear and paranoia.

As more and more of our citizenry conceal carries our homes and villages will resemble the old west, where gun fights rang out at the drop of a hat.  We will in time fail to respond to the horror of mass shootings, whether 5 year old children are the victims, college students, our co-workers or our family members, we will, with time, accept these events as a natural course of our lives, of our culture, because after all we have the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.  

Reason and experience will not move us forward.  We will be forever stuck in a time warp of 1791, where it made perfect sense to keep and bear arms.  As the world moves forward and countries that do not share our historical culture and do not keep and bear arms and do not experience the exceptionally high rate of mortality due to guns will look at us in wonder; an experiment in democracy gone awry.

Just as I listed above the reasons why individuals can justify carrying guns, below is a list of the reason why individuals should not be allowed to keep and bear arms.

April 1999 - two teenage schoolboys shot and killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves. 

July 1999 - a stock exchange trader in Atlanta, Georgia, killed 12 people including his wife and two children before taking his own life. 

September 1999 - a gunman opened fire at a prayer service in Fort Worth, Texas, killing six people before committing suicide. 

October 2002 - a series of sniper-style shootings occurred in Washington DC, leaving 10 dead. 

August 2003 - in Chicago, a laid-off worker shot and killed six of his former workmates. 

November 2004 - in Birchwood, Wisconsin, a hunter killed six other hunters and wounded two others after an argument with them. 

March 2005 - a man opened fire at a church service in Brookfield, Wisconsin, killing seven people. 

October 2006 - a truck driver killed five schoolgirls and seriously wounded six others in a school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania before taking his own life. 

April 2007 - student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 15 others at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, before shooting himself, making it the deadliest mass shooting in the United States after 2000. 

August 2007 - Three Delaware State University students were shot and killed in “execution style” by a 28-year-old and two 15-year-old boys. A fourth student was shot and stabbed. 

September 2007 - A freshman student at Delaware State University shot and wounded two other students at a campus dining hall. 

December 2007 - a 20-year-old man killed nine people and injured five others in a shopping center in Omaha, Nebraska. 

December 2007 - a woman and her boyfriend shot dead six members of her family on Christmas Eve in Carnation, Washington. 

February 2008 - a shooter who is still at large tied up and shot six women at a suburban clothing store in Chicago, leaving five of them dead and the remaining one injured. 

February 2008 - a man opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, killing five students and wounding 16 others before laying down his weapon and surrendering. 

July 2008 – A former student shot three people in a computer lab at South Mountain Community College, Phoenix, Arizona. 

September 2008 - a mentally ill man who was released from jail one month earlier shot eight people in Alger, Washington, leaving six of them dead and the rest two wounded. 

October 2008 - Several men in a car drove up to a dormitory at the University of Central Arkansas and opened fire, killing two students and injuring a third person. 

December 2008 - a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit opened fire at a family Christmas party in Covina, California, then set fire on the house and killed himself. Police later found nine people dead in the debris of the house. 

March 2009 - a 28-year-old laid-off worker opened fire while driving a car through several towns in Alabama, killing 10 people. 

March 2009 - a heavily-armed gunman shot dead eight people, many of them elderly and sick people, in a private-owned nursing home in North Carolina. 

March 2009 - six people were shot dead in a high-grade apartment building in Santa Clara, California. 

April 2009 – An 18-year-old former student followed a pizza deliveryman into his old dormitory, and shot the deliveryman, a dorm monitor, and himself at Hampton University, Virginia. 

April 2009 - a man shot dead 13 people at a civic center in Binghamton, New York. 

July 2009 - Six people, including one student, were shot in a drive-by shooting at a community rally on the campus of Texas Southern University, Houston. 

November 2009 - U.S. army psychologist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, leaving 13 dead and 42 others wounded. 

February 2010 – A professor opened fire 50 minutes into at a Biological Sciences Department faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, killing three colleagues and wounding three others 

January 2011 - a gunman opened fire at a public gathering outside a grocery in Tuscon, Arizona, killing six people including a nine-year-old girl and wounding at least 12 others. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured with a gunshot to the head. 

July 2012 - Masked gunman opens fire at midnight cinema screen of new Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring 58. Suspect James Holmes is arrested by police and awaiting trial. 

August 2012 - Gunman kills six people at Sikh temple in Wisconsin before being shot dead by police. Suspect is named as white supremacists Wade Michael Page. 

December 2012 – a gunman enters the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT and kills 26 people, 20 children under the age of 7, before turning the gun on himself.

December 2012 – a gunman in New York state  sets fire to his house, calls for the fire department to respond then kills two firemen and injures two others before turning the gun on himself.  His note stated that he died doing what he loves the best, killing humans.