It’s Not The Amendment

The absolute absurdity of pretending there’s no solution to a deadly problem that other countries have solved just because you willfully misinterpret an amendment to the benefit of a booming death industry. As if amendments can’t be and haven’t been amended.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) May 7, 2023

It’s not even the interpretation of the Amendment. 

It’s the political argument that the only polite society is an armed society. 

It’s the argument that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

 It’s the argument that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. (But then guns, unique among mechanical objects, just “go off” sometimes. We preach it round and square because: guns.)

It’s the argument that guns are a special class of property, with extra super special protections (an argument no more enshrined in law and the Constitution than the unlimited right to bear arms any fuckin’ way you want to.).

It’s the argument that guns are “how the West was won.” For white men, of course.

But most of all it’s the argument that guns must be brandished, carried, displayed in public, be ready to use (although most cops can’t hit what they’re aiming at, and the “good guy with a gun” is usually one more body on the pile, not a hero), and generally be pointed at anyone at anytime.

As opposed to the gun culture of my childhood, where guns were handled as dangerous weapons, were always treated as loaded, hence you never pointed one at anyone, and were used for hunting (carefully so, again, you only shot what you were aiming at, and that only game). And guns were not a means of self-defense, nor did any one need an automatic or even semiautomatic, rifle. Because you want to shoot the deer, not shred it into pulp.

The problem is not the Constitution, and the solution is not the Constitution (you really think you’re going to get 2/3rds of the Congress (one house at a time) and 2/3rds of the state legislatures to amend the 2nd Amendment? If that’s your hope, we truly have no hope.). The problem is Wayne LaPierre and the NRA representing gun makers. That’s been a very lucrative relationship. Time to end it.

Don’t blame the Constitution. That makes the problem intractable and almost 235 years old. Even Scalia’s “originalist” interpretation didn’t say we had to live with this. This is not the way it’s always been. It hasn’t even always been this way in my lifetime.

This is insanity. We the people can change it. We can change it by changing our politicians. We can change it by making our voices heard.

We have to. We are our only hope.