Two Tickets to the Gun Show

One morning recently after a long sleep, I woke up. I tend to do this after sleeping; it comes naturally to me. Upon waking, I went to the bathroom and began to go about the business most people tend to while in the W.C. Standing there in front of the urinal I had a brilliant bathroom epiphany: I had figured out gun control.

Gun control is a touchy issue with me and I really have to take aim and let loose with my own personal opinions. I should explain: in my house I have one gun, and it only shoots little plastic pellets to keep squirrels away. (I hate squirrels.) Between my father, my brother, and me, we only have that one gun, a replica Braveheart sword, and a Samaria sword that couldn’t cut butter. Maybe warm butter, but that’s pushing it. The only gun show I’ve been to is the kind where I roll up my sleeves and then girls laugh at me because I don’t have any muscles and my arms are pasty.

Not only do I not have any guns in my house, guns scare me. I fired a shotgun when I was eleven and it kicked so hard I got a bruise. The next time I fired a shotgun I was seventeen and I had to for a competition at church camp. They made me… at church camp. I fired a twenty two every once in a while. I understand that numbers mean something, but I really don’t have a clue what that is except that a twenty two isn’t really good for anything besides being divided by eleven and two. I really didn’t even like shooting the twenty two.

I’ve never been hunting. I think that it would be a good experience, but I don’t know if I could actually kill something. Well, I think I could kill a duck. Quack. Deer would be another matter.

My ‘hood is anything but. I might be the scariest person in my neighborhood, sporting my Mohawk and eyebrow ring. We’ve never been robbed (dang it, I might have just jinxed it there) but the biggest crime happening around here is going 40 in a 25. All this is to say my Braveheart sword is going to deter crime as much as keeping a pistol around would.

I have no need or want for a firearm in my house. I don’t want to go all secret agent and get a permit to conceal and carry. I don’t want to be packing. I don’t need to have a gun.

Gun control does not affect me.

“Amendment II: 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.” That is in the Bill of Rights, right after freedom of speech and religion and right before quartering a soldier in a house. It is antique and vague and is included by a group of people who had slaves and possibly used ‘thou’ in everyday conversation. I can’t prove that, but that’s was the case in The Patriot and I trust Mel Gibson.

This broken English passage is the basis for one of the continuing debates in the country, one that might not draw as big of crowds as gay marriage or abortion but has consistently been an issue in almost every election across the country.

Man, the Bill of Rights. That’s huge. The rest of the constitution only got the thumbs up on the assurance that the Bill of Rights would be passed. The framers of the constitution saw these ten amendments as extremely necessary to the newly formed country. Maybe they could have cleaned up their grammar a little bit.

Guns kill people. Millions of people have died because of guns. The Civil War, lots of people got shot then. The World Wars, not a ton of Americans got shot then, but a lot of Europeans did. The last five hundred years have been filled with wars that people killed people with guns.

Sure, people killed people before guns, they could just do it in greater numbers. It has been the strive of civilization to invent new ways to kill the barbarians. The Greeks were smart and had that democracy thing going on, but that only came about because they were the best warriors in the world for almost a millennium. (Seriously, the Greek middle class came about because the only people who could be soldiers were those that could afford the shield and spear, and since the rulers were asking them to die, they said “Hold up, we want a say in this.” And democracy was birthed into the world on the end of a spear.)

Okay, so guns just let people kill more people. Luckily death and democracy go hand in hand. There still is all of the problems of school shootings, and the center piece of that anti-gun battle cry is Columbine. Seven years ago, two boys killed fifteen people in a school in Colorado. Across the country there are around 10,000 gun murders a year.[1] Guns enable people to kill other people. But are guns really the source of human murder? Is there a place where we could find evidence that murders were prevalent before the invention of guns? What about, I don’t know, the Bible? Let’s flip it open and see if there’s anything in there about murder. What’s this? Genesis? Cain and Abel? The first story of three major religions after humans leave a perfect place is about murder. (If we want to hop back to the Greeks for a moment, Socrates told a story about Oedipus who rose to fame for something other than murdering his father, but that was a decent part of the story as well.) I guess what I am trying to say here is that murder had been a prominent fixture of human life long before guns were invented.

Alright, so, murder happens anyway. Kind of like war. Guns help, but controlling them wouldn’t really change anything. People will find a way to kill each other. It is a common theme of human existence.

But the founders knew that people would use guns to kill people, but why on earth would they keep guns in the hands of the common people. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, they all hated the common people. They felt the vulgarity of the commoners could not be trusted.

But in light of this knowledge, nay, in spite of this they still elected to have guns in the hands of these people. Why?

“A well regulated militia,” it begins. This phrase is could be taken multiple ways. A militia in current times leads the mind to picture a group of men hunting through the Minnesotan wilderness with semiautomatics. At the time a militia could have meant a state militia manned by local levies controlled by the state government. I wanted to look up how the word was used back then, but as my last name is not Scalia, I don’t keep an 1789 Webster’s near by, nor do I have a time machine so I could go back and ask the actual Webster what it means.

“Being necessary to the security of a free state,” it continues, and this does shed some light on the first clause. The militia is necessary to the free state, implying that the well regulated part comes from the state training and running the militia. This makes the militia a de facto army. The first two clauses of the amendment are designed to describe the fact that any state in existence needs an army to defend itself and maintain its freedom. The framers understood that specifically the United States would need to maintain a standing force to insure that Britain or another European power would not be able to conquer the U.S.

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms,” is the third clause of this complex sentence. This refers to “the people” that permeate the constitution. These people are the citizens of the U.S. The clause describes a right. The preposition states it is of the people (the citizens) and the right is “to keep and bear arms.” This clause describes what the right is. It has a series (keep and bear) and so it separates the next clause to connect to the right.

“Shall not be infringed.” The right shall not be infringed. This is opposed to the army described by the first two clauses. It could be simplified as such: Because of the military, which we have to have to keep those crazy Brits out, the right to keep a Glock next to the bed shall not be hampered by the government. Okay, that wasn’t simplified, but the main point is that the country needs a military, and thus the people need to be armed.

The people, the citizens of the U.S., need to be armed. The framers wanted guns in the hand of the people to keep freedom around. This was because without the guns that the colonies had had on hand, they would have been at the mercy of the British. The framers wanted to insure that the government would always fear the governed.

Jefferson wanted a revolution every twenty years. Every generation. We have failed. And we’ve lost the reason behind second amendment. Charlton Heston had the right idea when he shouted “From my cold dead hands!” at the NRA convention. Maybe he was misguided but we should always fear the government when it attempts to take away the right to keep a gun.

I could imagine a situation where the common people would need to rise as one to defeat a controlling government. A world much like 1984 is the fear a lot of people have, but that is much too late for any armed resistance. I guess we really need to be wary, and possibly take action when one group controls the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme court, and is clearly abusing that power. We would really need to be on the look out if they started to subtly take away civil liberties. The problem is that people might not notice this situation if it happened slowly over ten years or so.

The current state of things a revolution is not needed. As a country we are doing fairly well and while the government is infringing on liberties a little, the time has not come for a revolution. But we aren’t far from that step. But if every person was armed and willing to do something then any president would think twice before making a move on our liberties.

We are the final check on the government.

I don’t own a gun, but maybe it is my civic duty to keep one around. Not to deter a criminal, but to remind the president that I am not at the mercy of the government but the government is at the mercy of me.

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[1] I’m just guessing here, but it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?