Gune Are (Were) The American Way
by b.c.

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-

They can have my gun when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.
                                                                                 -bumper sticker-

People get confused when they consider gun control. The Constitutional amendment for the right to keep and bear arms is one of the most misunderstood provisions in that esteemed document. The reason we get so confused is the pervasive attitude that America still likes to think of itself as essentially a frontier nation, settling the West, conquering the land, etc.,. Consequently, the idea of not being able to have as many guns as we wish is thought of as almost sacrilege. To every red-blooded American it would be akin to spitting on your mother's grave or refusing pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day. The other area of confusion lies in the fact that the Second Amendment is rarely discussed with any rational thought. Nowhere does the rhetoric get thicker than in a discussion of gun control (except perhaps abortion).

We all know the provision is somewhat inapplicable in light of today's technology. You may ask, "Why do you say that? Why should we assume that automatically?" My reply would be that if you take the provision in a strictly literal manner, The Right To Keep And Bear Arms, by that standard we should be able to keep any arms. We should be able to keep rocket-launchers and self-propelled guns and recoilless rifles and anti-tank weapons, i.e., military hardware. Those interested in a truncated translation of the provision must already feel cheated. The right to keep and bear arms, arms, shall not be infringed. Arms can mean anything. The National Rifle Association says that you can't start classifying weapons. You can't say we can have the shotguns but we can't have the pistols, we can have the rifles but we can't have the assault rifles. The Constitution says the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Very well. That must mean we should be able to have whatever arms we want, the recoilless rifles and the machine guns and the anti-tank weapons, etc...but we know that is not the case. We know instinctively that people should not be allowed to keep rocket launchers in their possession. Rocket launchers are military hardware and should be looked on as such. Therefore, if we decide that the Second Amendment really doesn't mean the right to keep and bear any arms we want, we now open the provision up to the realization that the forefathers couldn't have possibly imagined the assault rifle, the machine gun, the rocket launcher, the technology of the twentieth century. We know there must be some restraints placed on it. There are some weapons that are acceptable to be owned, and some that are not. So now the discussion becomes one of deciding which weapons are acceptable and which are not because we've established that the provision itself is somewhat ambiguous and lacking in modern application.

This line of argument doesn't even broach the discussion of what the framers meant, what they intended, when they voted that provision into being. In 1789, we had no standing, full-time, peace-time army. We were a nation of insurgents who were expected, at any given time, to defend our new-found homeland, turning every house into a potential stronghold. More on that later.

So which weapons do we keep? If we've decided that the Constitution did not intend for us to keep and bear every arm under the sun, then the discussion is really one of degrees. I have never suggested that people should have to give up their rifles and shotguns. No one does because that would be impossible and unnecessary. Rifles and shotguns hold limited ammunition, are slow firing, and are difficult to hide. Besides, anything that can rationally be thought of as a weapon used for hunting (animals) should be allowed to be kept. So what about the pistol?

Most weapons throughout history have been invented for war, but none more so than the pistol. The modern pistol (revolver) was designed by Samuel Colt in 1836 as a close-in weapon to kill people with. It has no other purpose. It has rarely been used to hunt with. It has only been used to take out and shoot at a tree, a target, or a person. It is designed for hard-hitting, in close, and the earliest pistols (in the 1500's) were originally the replacement for the short sword. Why do we need pistols? And if we do, what could possibly be unconstitutional about a two week waiting period?...or a month. Check them out. We don't issue a driver's license without checking people out. We don't issue voter registration cards without checking people out. There are all different forms of checks and balances in our lives so that owning a weapon, among other things, is a privilege, not a right; Like the privilege of driving a car, the privilege of operating a snowmobile, the privilege of voting (or fishing!), indeed of anything that requires a license. If you want to own a gun, you should be required to get a license. You should be required to take shooting lessons. You should be required to understand the nature of loading and unloading a weapon. How is it that we put people through months and months of training to drive a car, and yet we issue guns to people with a smile and a few bucks. I can go to a gun shop today and buy a fifteen shot Berretta pistol that is essentially an automatic weapon, and is easily concealed. I could do a lot of damage with a weapon like that, to myself or anyone else who happens to be standing around. So what is unconstitutional about requiring me to be checked out and found not to be a criminal or an otherwise nefarious person, any more than it's Big Brother-ish to obtain a driver's license?

As with other weapons, Americans have argued that with crime on the rise, the pistol is the last line of defense for the average citizen and therefore is essential. I disagree with that conclusion and while I am unable to furnish very much concise data on that point, my suspicion is that pistols, in the hands of the average citizen, actually escalate violent crime in our nation. Since everyone is armed, many burglars, car thieves, etc. (what I would consider the second tier of crime) feel they too must be armed, and many crimes which would end peacefully, albeit with the loss of possessions, end in disaster. There is also the problem of people feeling secure in owning a pistol who have rarely, if ever, used one. They leave them loaded around the house and children get killed. They get mugged and in their efforts to be a hero, they turn what otherwise would be a mere transaction into getting murdered. I suspect that many more innocent people die than live due to their inexperience and/or their vigilante attempts to prevent crimes. In fact, the Emory Center for Injury Control has found that a gun in the home is 18 times more likely to kill someone living in the home than an intruder. Another study, this one by the Center for Injury Prevention And Control (part of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta) found that people living in a home where a gun is kept are 5 times more likely to commit suicide than households without a gun.

It seems obvious to me that the answers to violent crime lay in the changing of people's attitudes, in providing hope and opportunity for all, in adequate police protection. It does not lie in arming everyone to the teeth. Critics of gun control say that in regulating or eliminating pistols you take them out of the law abiding people's hands and put them into the hands of the criminals alone. However, if you take pistols out of people's hands you make every unregistered pistol a crime to own. There will always be a black market in guns but if all pistols had to be licensed along with the people who own them, you make it much easier for police to confiscate and destroy illegal weapons.

O.K., on to assault rifles. Here is another weapon designed exclusively for war. The American Thompson sub-machine-gun was one of the earliest designs and was intended for the cramped environment of urban street fighting. It was designed for the brutal combat of Stalingrad fought twenty years later and, in fact, the first true assault rifle was designed by the German army in 1943 in response to the bitter lessons they learned there. What anyone needs with weapons like these is beyond me, and if we can't decide that they should be eliminated, why can't we have licensed collectors as the only outlet for these weapons, with provisions that do not allow convicted criminals to be a collector. If you're a criminal, you are not allowed that privilege for the rest of your life. You forfeit that in your criminal actions. Only collectors should be allowed to own these types of weapons and should have even more extensive checks made on them than the average citizen. In this way, the average citizen, who doesn't need an assault rifle, won't get one, any more than he could lay his hands legally on a rocket launcher. I'm not unsympathetic to having fun. A rocket launcher would be very fun to have around. Even if I didn't want to kill someone with it, I could still take it out to a big open field and blow up an old junk car. It would be a screech and I wouldn't hurt anyone, but our government doesn't allow me to have a rocket launcher because the potential for damage is too great and that makes it illegal. So why shouldn't that same logic apply to assault rifles?

Let me return to the forefathers. As I said before, the forefathers' intention in 1789 with the right to keep and bear arms provision was to insure a defensive force at any time. We had no full-time army and therefore could not guarantee the integrity of our own borders. Every house was expected to be a fortification, a stronghold. In our modern nation we have the National Guard, the Coast Guard, the Air Force, the Marines, the Army, and the Navy. Many of these units reside within our own borders. Clearly we face little threat from abroad, or even from within, which couldn't be handled by one or all of these units. I think if the founding fathers were alive today they would concur with the conclusion that a "grass roots" army is no longer needed. We pay good money for a National Guard to protect us. Why not get our money's worth and let them do their job guarding the nation.

The only other plausible argument made for the unrestricted right to keep and bear arms is the argument that the forefathers intended for us to keep weapons to protect us from our government. In 1790 that was a plausible argument, not now. If our government, with the blessing of the military, was set on crushing our way of life and anyone who got in their way, there would be little we could do to stop them. The presence or absence of assault rifles or pistols would hardly turn the tide. The government has tanks and trucks and ships and planes and so many resources available to them, things our forefathers couldn't have imagined, that resistance would be suicidal. Putting up a hypothetical defense against our government was possible in 1790, but not anymore.

We are the only country in the Western World that allows its citizens to keep unrestricted weapons in their homes. We also carry the dubious distinction of having the highest violent crime rate in the Industrialized World: One person in every 100,000 will be killed with a gun each year in the United States. In Germany, it's one in every 1.5 million. In Japan, it's one in every 4.5 million. Is it mere coincidence that our violent crime rate is over ten times higher than our nearest "competitor"? I think not.

The gun lobby likes to say, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." As with their arguments in defense of the Second Amendment, they are only partially right. Guns don't kill people, but guns do help people kill people, and in that respect should be thought of as an accomplice of sorts. And anything that makes it vastly easier and more convenient for people to kill people should be regulated and licensed, if not eliminated.

I think it is time we as Americans all grow up and realize that we are no longer a frontier culture, that we are no longer the nation of Daniel Boone and Paul Revere. The Redcoats are not coming. That stage in our development is over. It is no longer acceptable to allow America the adult to continue to eat dinner in the high-chair. It's time for America the adult to become a mature nation instead of settling for the Man-child we're getting used to.

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