Don't worry my right winger friends, even though your "side" lost rather badly last election, no one is going to take your guns away. If you have been sleeping with them under you pillow, ready to defend your right to the death, (that whole "take it out of my cold, dead fingers" thing) from the hoards of liberals that are about to break down your door, teach evolution to your kids, make sure you health care provider doens't drop you for no reason, and confiscate your tools of mass murder, relax. At the very least you can unload your guns and lock them up in your gun cabinet safe from the kids. (You do have a locking gun cabinet, right?)
The Democrats folded on gun control a long time ago. Even when one of their own was shot in the head along with 15 others (six dead) by a mentally ill man wielding a 9mm Glock semi-auto pistol with a 33 shot magazine, there was no serious talk of gun control. But it bears repeating, by a mentally ill man wielding a 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol with a 33 shot magazine. A man who had be rejecting by the Army, had dropped out of collage rather than face a mentally health review, and all but posted what he was about to do on Facebook.
Though most of my fellow citizens seem to disagree (why I am way, way off the reservation) it seems to me that:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state..."
is the exact opposite of,
"A citizenry at constant threat from mad men who have access to unregulated, high capacity weapons of mass murder".
Free to be murdered is a definition of freedom for crazy people.
There is zero chance of it happening, but if the people of the United States, by what ever means, reinterpreted the 2ed Amendment of the Constitution as meaning, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state..." and started passing laws that kept high capacity killing machines out of the hands of crazy people, we would not be abandoning the Constitution.
We would be returning to it.
The NRA, and the people who support it, are the ones undermining the security of a free state.
But then, a free and secure state is the last thing the Powers-That-Be want. A free and secure state does not need nor want those who rule by fear and hate.
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I've been wrestling with another thought about guns...particularly the high performance killing machines of assault rifles and semi-auto handguns with high capacity magazines; machines built explicitly to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. It is an offensive thought, or at least it occurs to me couched in offensive imagery, but that's the way it is ... so here goes.
Imagine a person who has kiddie porn on his computer. This person has actually never touched a child in an inappropriate matter, let alone raped or abused anyone. Imagine even further that the images he possesses are not even pictures of real children, but caricatures or cartoons. Just the idea gives most people a case of the shudders, and according to
18 U.S.C. § 1466A (2008) § 1466A / OBSCENE VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN
such a person is, in fact, a criminal. (I'm not sure I quite understand (b)(2)(B) - something about artistic or literary value - but (b)(2)(B)(c) is pretty clear.)
Again, this is a person who has never actually hurt anyone, but he is absolutely a criminal and (I think most people would agree) an ugly excuse for a human being. He is an ugly excuse for a human being because he imagines such a thing, but he is a criminal because he has in his possession an item that enhances his imaginings. Is it much of a reach to think that having the item is a step toward acting out on his imaginings? From the thought to actually doing the thing (in this case accumulating illegal images) is the step from being ugly to being a criminal.
I am sure you have guessed where I am going with this, so I'll give you a moment to get there before me ...
What is the moral difference between someone caressing his AK47 and shredding pictures of human targets with a hail of high velocity bullets, and another gazing at kiddie cartoon porn while stroking his pecker? Are not the fantasies of both equally offensive? And if not, shouldn't they be? Tell me both are not caressing evil.
I admit that the target pictures are usually caricatures of cartoon bad guys pointing big, bad guns at the shooter. But those are no less fantasies than the porn guy thinking that the children in his mind are being treated gently, and with love. When the porn guy acts on his delusions the children are not being loved. And when the gun guy acts on his the targets are not bad guys with guns but a theater full of movie fans or people at a political rally. (And the dead and wounded usually include children.)
Maybe the NRA is more porn empire than it is terrorist organization. That would certainly explain its popularity.
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I understand that assault weapons grew out of a military need to kill as many enemy solders as possible, as quickly as possible. That has no bearing on gun control. Besides, war may be an evil that human kind seems unable to outgrow (which would make it likely that our species is going to have a very limited run in the cosmos), but it is evil nonetheless. Flooding a society with the tools of that evil isn't doing us much good.
My version of gun control has nothing to do with hand guns holding 9 bullets (though that seems rather excessive as well). It has nothing to do with hunters having shotguns or scooped rifles to pop deer and rabbits. (Even though both have been used in domestic terrorism.) Most of the gun folks I know seem to live in constant fear of "home invasion", it being their primary defense for having such weapons. (A few of the real bonkers are pretty sure the civil war will start in a week or so - and want to be ready to take a side. It is a pretty good question as to them being on the same side as democracy, freedom, civil liberty, and a first world society, but that is a different issue.) Yet living in constant fear of a home invasions seems about as logical as thinking you are going to will the multi-million dollar lottery some day. You might, but the odds are vanishingly small.
An aside: I have had a house burglarize once (while we were sleeping in the next room). My garage has been robbed a couple of times. I have never been the victim of a "home invasion". And though I was hugely pissed at the time, those who stole my friend's stereo system or the stuff from my garage didn't do anything that deserved the death penalty. Had I opened fire with an assault weapon it is likely that anyone in the next room, or next house for that matter, would be in at least as much risk as the bad guys. And before you drag out that old, "hitting what you aim at is gun control" bullshit, military folks practice all the time and often miss, cops practice and miss as well (ask New Yorker about that one). Sharp shooters miss all the time - I've seen Top Shot. Not much chance you are going to be dead-eyed Dick rubbing the sleep out of your eyes in the middle of the night. At least with a shot gun or hand gun that has just a few bullets in it, the only people at risk are the bad guys and your family, not so much your neighbors or the paperboy outside.
Still, no one is coming to take your guns away. Human kind isn't that smart generally, and the US of A is not that advanced a culture. Maybe though, you would consider just getting rid of yours for moral and logical reasons? Loving and owning assault weapons would seem to put you in the wrong camp on both counts ...
... just saying.
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