Buy guns, kill people, console the victims’ families,
talk about legislation, forget and move on to the next news cycle, then repeat.
Less than a month ago the Las Vegas massacre dominated
the news, followed by talk of gun control regulation, an immediate increase in
gun sales fearing the latter, and promises of at least regulating bump stocks
that convert semi automatic weapons into machine guns . Now it seems like it
never happened, 58 people killed, hundreds injured. This is the pattern of the past. The NRA has puppet
politicians well under control.
Imagine if the automobile was just invented and people
went out and bought them, no license or testing required, few traffic laws, and
who needs stop signs and lights? Autos
still kill more people than guns, but those deaths now are nearly neck and
neck. We choose to regulate
automobiles, testing and licenses required, registration so we can track who
owns what and if someone buys or sells more than a certain number of autos each
year, he/she is considered a dealer and another level of regulation is reached.
Today, crazy people like Stephen Paddock can amass a war arsenal
without any tracking information.
Regretfully this means giving up some privacy, but we give it up to
drive a car, why not owning a gun?
My entry after the San Bernardino tragedy almost two
years ago (written during the heated election season, thus explaining its
political bent) seems to be as relevant today so until the next inevitable
incident, I repeat….
Tuesday,
December 8, 2015
It
Can’t Happen Here?
Unfortunately,
the horror in San Bernardino has fed into all of this, “legitimizing” such
dangerous rhetoric and escalating it to personal attacks on President Obama
(who now has low polling numbers about keeping America “safe,” the exact inverse
of what those numbers were after bin Laden was nailed) - and subsequent
accusations that any call for stronger gun control laws is merely politicizing
the San Bernardino tragedy.
But
such calls have gone on for years with fierce Republican and NRA opposition. I do not naively believe that better gun
control laws and enforcement would magically eliminate such tragedies,
especially in the short term. But I do
believe that the Second Amendment, which was written in the days of musket
rifles and flintlock pistols, needs serious updating.
At
that time, we needed an armed militia and also the founding fathers believed
that an armed citizenry would be deterrent to the rise of a despotic
government. The world has changed since
then, weapons of war unimaginable to our forefathers, and, now, mostly in the
hands of the military and law enforcement.
To make some of the same weapons legitimately available to the citizenry
no longer serves the purpose of protecting us from a despotic government as the
military will always have superior weaponry (is an converted AR-15 adequate
protection against a tank?). The proliferation of automatic weapons just
further endangers us all, giving us a false sense of security by just having
one in our closet.
No,
this is a country of laws and checks and balances and we have to depend on our
tried-and-true institutions as well as the much maligned (by Trump in
particular) fourth estate to keep our government transparent and trustworthy.
If some fringe element threatens us in our homes and public places, we need
better intelligence to prevent it and rapid response law enforcement to protect
us.
Fully
automatic weapons (ones that operate as a machine gun) need to be banned, and
guns should be registered just like a car, an equally dangerous thing. That means getting a license, passing a
rigorous background check and license renewals (a gun owner having to report if
it is sold, just like a car). Guns for self
defense, hunting and target practicing are understandable but how can one argue
that an automatic weapon is needed?
Certainly not for hunting (where is the sport in that?). Do we really want our neighbors to be totting
an automatic weapon citing Florida’s ambiguous “stand your ground” law as a
justification?
Will
that keep guns out of the hands of the “bad guys” as the Republicans like to
call them? No, but it’s a start and of
course the devil is in the details of how such gun control is
administered. Senseless to get further
into it here – I’m merely expounding an opinion.
