firearms | Playing in the World Game

“The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime”
Retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, PBS Interview in 1991.

“The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies, the militia, would be maintained for the defense of the state.”
Warren Burger, AP article, 1991

“The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires”
Warren Burger, AP article, 1991

America has a problem with guns. Yes, with guns. Over 45,000 gun deaths in 2020, more than victims of automobile accidents. The right wing wants to blame everything other than the weapons themselves, things like mental illness; other countries have people with mental illness as well, and they have nowhere near the number of firearm deaths that our country racks up every year. It’s the guns, around 400 million of them, more than one for each and every citizen of our nation.

The fact that the 2nd Amendment has been so thoroughly weaponized by the gun lobby and the NRA pretty much means that there is little to no chance it will ever be repealed.

Legislators, particularly Republicans, receive obscene amounts of cash from the gun lobby. According to Market Watch,

Notice the difference in donations to Republicans as compared to Democrats. Looking at the chart above (from 2017), it’s clear that the NRA and associated groups are paying senators to do virtually nothing about gun legislation except sending thoughts and prayers, even when children are slaughtered by the dozen in school shootings.

When cornered about the deaths, Republicans will deflect and delay:

And in the end, nothing gets done, despite the fact that the majority of Americans want stricter gun laws.

The poll by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.
AP-NORC poll

But something has to give, and this is what I require from our legislators ¹

It’s time. Because doing nothing means that we all agree dead children are an acceptable price to pay for unlimited access to firearms. And it’s not.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ There are more things that could be done, but these are an absolute minimum. Things like a ban on assault-style weapons and large magazines, outlawing bump stocks, mandatory background checks and waiting period, among others. Even if you went for the whole enchilada, people would still be able to “exercise their second amendment rights” as they have come to understand them.

Updated 2/23/2018 after the Pennsylvania school shooting and the Las Vegas Massacre.

Edit Again, after the Uvalde massacre: Sensible and meaningful gun control is more critical now than ever before.

Note: This blog is not a place for debate. If you have a pressing need to prattle the NRA poison, do so on your own website, not here.

An image has resurfaced on Facebook lately highlighting a quote from former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger:

I did a litte digging just to make sure this wasn’t Snopes-worthy, and it turns out that this quote came from a PBS News Hour interview in 1991 and is correctly attributed to Chief Justice Burger.

With two school shootings in two weeks, (Oregon last week, and Arizona yesterday), it seems only right to be asking questions.

An article originally published in Parade magazine in 1990, asks some really good ones (excerpt below), and I submit it here for consideration. At the time of this update, you can still see the full article at Google Books (click the link for page 377):

The Constitution does not mention automobiles or motorboats, but the right to keep and own an automobile is beyond question; equally beyond question is the power of the state to regulate the purchase or the transfer of such a vehicle and the right to license the vehicle and the driver with reasonable standards. In some places, even a bicycle must be registered, as must some household dogs.

If we are to stop this mindless homicidal carnage, is it unreasonable:

to provide that, to acquire a firearm, an application be made reciting age, residence, employment and any prior criminal convictions?
to required that this application lie on the table for 10 days (absent a showing for urgent need) before the license would be issued?
that the transfer of a firearm be made essentially as with that of a motor vehicle?
to have a “ballistic fingerprint” of the firearm made by the manufacturer and filed with the license record so
that, if a bullet is found in a victim’s body, law enforcement might be helped in finding the culprit?

These are the kind of questions the American people must answer if we are to preserve the “domestic tranquillity” promised in the Constitution.

What is clear is that in today’s society, the domestic tranquility is not being preserved, nor are the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. School shootings appear in the news regularly, but less-reported is the daily slaughter in our inner cities and elsewhere, for example the recent murders of a dog walker and a backpacker by three drifters in California. Articles like this surface, are news for a day, and are then forgotten, and nobody seems to care that gang-bangers are killing each other and innocent bystanders with reckless abandon. For the victims of such acts of violence, somehow those inalienable rights are failing to apply, and it must stop.
By Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States (1969-86)
Parade Magazine, January 14, 1990, page 4

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment can be summarized by two flags that I’ve seen flying in my own neighborhood:

“Molon Lave“

both of which echo the “cold dead hands” sentiment originated by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and popularized by Charlton Heston.

One of my European colleagues asked, at a Facebook discussion of this issue,

You do realize that, seen from abroad, you all seem to have taken leave of your senses?

A libertarian friend of mine responded,

And from an American’s perspective, … you appear to be incredibly vulnerable.

These are the views from the polar opposites. We have to find a middle ground, and we have to stop the carnage. Not to do so is to sacrifice our humanity at the altar of death. With the words of Warren Burger ringing in my ears – and it’s to be remembered that he was a conservative justice, not a liberal one – the questions he asks appear both valid and sane.

My additional thoughts on the subject can be found at Guns are in America’s DNA

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Playing in the World Game

As One

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