If you’re thinking maybe this time is different, maybe congress will bring an option to the floor, if you’re thinking maybe a committee will have a serious conversation about how to work fewer guns into the hands of people who would use them against people outside the scope of warfare, if you’re thinking it stops now, you’re wholly delusional because your supposition is dependent on others taking action on their own accord while you do nothing, and if that’s what you believe should happen, that others should take action because you send an inflammatory tweet or rant about the tax bill on your talk show, I’d go as far as saying you’re harming America at present because we have too many words out there, we have to many opinions and editorials and so gone are the days in which, even as in Hungary in 1956, intellectuals were able to change a nation by ostensibly affecting public opinion with newspaper articles, and here are the days in which words are (pretty much) instantly covered by other noises, making their salience weak, their effectiveness minimal, and their ability to stay stuck to the wall covered in oh-so-much-more shit unlikely at best and impossible at worst to the point that you’ll forget these very words by the moment you’re through with lunch — So ok, let me start again: Each time something like this happens, I like to read the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Here it is:
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.
Apart from the third comma, seems pretty clear. Citizens of the United States of America have the right to own arms — arms being wonderfully vague and undefined (even at the end of the 18th century they ranged from dinner forks to cannons) and, as such, defined as anything that could be used for self-defense. From whom? From anyone and everyone. Therefore, “arms” in the Second Amendment includes: hands, feet, boots, sand, whips, chains, maces, Mace, folding knifes, tactical knives, throwing knives, Bowie knives, machetes, axes, spears, scythes, bear traps, bows, arrows, crossbows, muskets, shotguns, rifles, handguns, semi-automatic handguns, fully-automatic rifles, sniper rifles, M-16s with beta-C mags mounted on a MG-42 tripods, rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices, bouncing betties, APP M-57 AP blast mines, c-4, dynamite, ether, nitroglycerine, mustard gas, sarin gas, napalm, Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, glide bombs, bunker busters, GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs, neutron bombs, cobalt bombs, hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear bombs, de-neuralizers, laser grenades, antimatter chargers, matrix inverters, frequency magnifiers, and a unique strain of smallpox to which you’ve built up an immunity for your family, but to which the neighbors who have been infringing upon your backyard juuust past the swing-set have certainly not had the slow biological inculcation to withstand and which will kill them if they mow that goddam line even one goddam centimeter (if you knew what a centimeter was) closer to your house.
We’ll come back to that list in a moment — but for now, let’s break to consider the fun fact that a good (probably) third of those weapons listed above are illegal in sanctioned warfare, and five won’t exist for 70 years.
The general argument for gun control is the founding fathers, T. Jefferson (who missed the first Constitutional Convention while in France), B. Franklin, Alex Hamilton, et al., were not privy to the glorious weapons humanity would devise to kill ourselves, and so they were all like, “Freedom! Arm Yourselves and protect Your Homes!” (because they also capitalized random words two and a half centuries ago.)
This point against the Second Amendment (“Article the fourth…”) not novel, but also not unique to “arms.” Upon leaving office, George Washington gave a speech in which he argued the United States should not get involved in European affairs or disputes. Some years later, John Quincy Adams, echoed that message when he said the oft-quoted line, America does not go overseas to “find monsters” to destroy. But then! At the end of the 19th century, a guy named Teddy Roosevelt said, oh sure, Washington was a great guy, the best even, and I’d love to chill with him, but he lived in a different time that we do now. Teddy said that in his time (ca. 1900), to not go abroad to Cuba to fight the Spanish following the explosion of a U.S. Naval vessel was categorically Unpatriotic.
And thus began over a century of slaying monsters — helped of course by two enormous wars that threatened to destroy the world and in which the U.S. had popular cause for participation.
Well then, let’s leave the tired “inability to predict horrible weapons” argument and take that burden off Jefferson et al. — let’s skip over the argument that we no longer need militias because we have local police forces — and, you know what, let’s forget the entire Second Amendment. Let’s not even bring it up in our conversation about gun control, about weather or not we should allow folks to own guns, buy guns at gun shows, forego background checks before we place gas-operated, rotating-bolt, air-cooled AramaLite AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle in their sweaty little palms.
Let’s instead act like we’re at war.
Let’s say I’m a gun owner and we’re at war. I own lots of guns. I keep them locked up safe. I’m responsible. I own an AR-15, an AR-10, an M16, a Beretta 21A Bobcat, two Beretta shotguns, a Colt M4, a IMI Jericho 9mm and a IMI Desert Eagle I got from my friend in Israel, a Glock 17, three Glock 19s, a Glock 21, two Walther PPs, and an adorable antique Deringer, the same kind of gun J.W. Boothe used to put a bullet in the back of Abraham Lincolns head. This is my arsenal.
This is my arsenal and we’re at war. The enemy is anyone. The enemy is everyone. The enemy may even be the U.S. Government.
If we accept those premises, let’s add a few more:
1) My guns protect me;
2) I do not want the U.S. Government to take away my guns (this truth goes back to a hundred years before the U.S. Revolutionary War, by the way, to when a king of England tried to take away citizen weaponry because they were a different religion than he);
3) the more guns I have than my faceless, nameless enemies, the more protected I am;
4) I have no problem buying guns because I’m responsible, safe, and sane;
5) if I have a commodity (that being a gun in this case) and someone else does not, that makes my commodity cooler and more valuable.
Therefore we conclude:
1) I should want to make it harder for others to buy, own, and bear guns (today’s “arms);
2) as such, and as a gun owner, I should support thorough, universal, and tireless background checks upon sales of firearms with all my heart.
That’s all for today. Next time we’ll discuss how mass ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons could lead to WWI-style warfare and deaths on a commensurate scale. Dismissed.