OP-Ed on Gun Control

Patrice has been on a tear of late regarding gun control and background checks, and while I have been sitting on the sidelines since many of my thoughts regarding gun limitation are far more restrictive than anything our legislators have passed. 

What changed my mind to action and speak out?  The recent photo in the Wall Street Journal depicted here.  I have to ask: “Is this the America we want as a nation?”  When I saw this picture I thought it might have been a photo from Eastern Ukraine, Syria, the Gaza Strip or a host of other Third World countries who are engaged in running conflicts – CBS Evening News reported that there are 41 shooting wars around the globe today, but no it was taken in Midland, Texas.  We have traveled to Third World countries where this would not be a strange sight, the Yucatan Peninsula comes quickly to mind where local “authorities” in civilian clothes walked the street with sawed off shotguns slung over their shoulders.

It is time to stop this nonsense; we need to push our Constitution back to the intent of our Founding Fathers, before we become a lawless state where we will find the Old West – two guys in the street drunk and shooting at each other, in a street near your home.  Despite what the “Supremes” have ruled, if you go back and review the six Second Amendment drafts that were rejected in favor of the current one, I think anyone untarnished by the tripe of the NRA will readily conclude that it was the intent of our First Congress to provide for a well-organized Militia (what we now refer to as our State National Guard units) that would be organized, armed and disciplined to “suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”  From my reading of Section 8 of the Constitution,  Congress has the authority to “provide for the common Defence” with the Militia being the vehicle for such defense.  To carry this thought a step further, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, as President Thomas Jefferson, proposed that the federal army be disbanded with all defense being delegated to the State Militias.  Congress didn’t agree, but certainly it is hard to question that Jefferson was a knowledgeable participant in the inception of our Nation and a voice in the constitutional process.

I see little comparison between the Founding Fathers view of citizen soldiers armed with single shot muskets who would respond to an impending threat by the clang of the town’s church bells and today’s xenophobic, undisciplined, and often untrained rabble that call themselves the NRA.  To make my point, I hiked into the national forest yesterday – signs along the road said “no target shooting next 12 miles,” “no target shooting next 11 miles” – I assume these admonitions continued until you left the national forest: Could anything be more clear?  When I reached the top of Mount Herman, I could hear random shooting from the west where there once WAS a shooting range.  Occasionally the shooting broke into bursts of 5 to 15 shots, where I suppose these would-be Rambo’s enacted some fantasy of glorify, death and mayhem.  Is this the NRA’s view of trained, responsible and sensible gun use?  And to add to this unauthorized, irresponsible target shooting, there is a trail loop just behind their “killing zone” – one of the reasons the shooting range was closed.

Our country saw the threat in driving cars without proper training on the laws of the road, the practical training of the novice in safe driving habits and a testing and licensing procedure that would demonstrate your knowledge of the laws, mental stability behind the wheel and competence to meeting reasonable standards of performance on the road.  Cars don’t kill people any more than do guns, yet prudent minds realized the danger of sending an ignorant, untrained and undisciplined novice onto the road.  The same is true for gun enthusiasts, no one wants to limit their rights to responsible gun ownership and use, we just want to make sure they know the rules of the road and can demonstrate that they understand them, and will obey them.  Like my Rambo friends in the forest who didn’t follow the clearly posted rules, were acting irresponsibly and showing their ignorance of prudent gun use, they should lose their license until they can show that they have been trained in some good sense and maturity.  By the way, how often does a hunter effectively bring down a deer with a 15 round clip?  Like the car enthusiast who often shows his machismo with more horsepower, I sense these 15+ shot clips displays the same high levels of testosterone.

If this example isn’t enough, how about the recent story of a Michigan man who shot and killed an inebriated black teenage girl with a shotgun blast to the face through a locked screen door; he is now claiming “stand your ground” amnesty.  It’s hard to imagine a reasonable gun community supporting such irresponsible behavior.  All he had to do was close the front door, click the lock and call 911; he was not inebriated, or hasn’t alleged it, he was old enough to have some good sense, and he should have shown maturity in defusing this less than threatening event.

For the gun community, the paranoid thought that 300 million weapons would be confiscated by the federal government is absolutely ludicrous to me.  We live in a world of instantaneous social media, any attempt at mass confiscation of guns would turn into a civil war assuming the army would even obey such an order.  And the argument of dictators collecting guns as a first act to total power assumes that Congress would stand for it, the military would stand for it and that the American people would stand for it.  If these groups didn’t stand their ground against such a tyrant, we have much bigger problems than just the confiscation of weapons.

So I guess my question remains: “What kind of United States do the America people want?”  The Third World gun photo of gun totting Americans accompanying this opinion, or a less threatening world where guns are registered in case they are stolen, shooters licensed to prove competence, guns being left under lock and key until your next hunting adventure or trip to an authorized target practice shooting range, and a shift from “stand your ground” laws to the less bellicose laws on the right to self-defense.