Let’s cut the crap. If
the second amendment were about hunting, it would say, “Meat being necessary for
sustenance, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
Instead, it says…
Wait! Don’t go. It’s short. I know you think it’s complicated, maybe paragraphs
or pages worth, but that’s not how they did things back then. Here it is. In
toto. One sentence!
“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.”
That’s it. I was
struck, the last time I heard it, by the word “Militia,” because danged if it
didn’t sound, and doesn’t look, a lot like the word, “Military.” Gee, could it
be? I wondered, so I looked it up in my favorite dictionary, a giant block of
thin-skinned pages, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.
There were 3
definitions. The one that fits best is the third - a body of citizen soldiers,
as opposed to professional soldiers.
The founders had just finished fighting a war for
their freedom from the King of England. They’d had a bad taste of oppressive
government. They did not want it to happen again, from the outside, or the
inside. The Second Amendment was meant to insure against either.
There is no mention
of self-protection, because there was no thought in anyone’s mind but that
people needed guns to defend themselves, their children, their animals, and their
land. That was their own business, but keeping a free country was everybody’s.
Old-fashioned, you
say? We don’t need it anymore, the world being what it is today. And you know
what? You say the same thing about free speech. We don’t need it anymore. People
should not be allowed to voice their opinions if it keeps the President from
instituting his agenda. Let’s get rid of Fox News and talk radio. They’re
gumming up the works, making us unhappy with our rulers. We get all the news we
need from NPR, MSNBC, and Media Matters.
The gun-control
debate confuses three distinct, legal, and important gun-apps. Hunting, which
nobody writing the constitution thought necessary to even mention, self-defense
which everyone knows is an “inalienable”, and the armed populace to keep the
free state secure. This last is why government, less interested in a free state
than the founders had been, is so intent on “infringing”. It’s on the agenda
all the time, and when tragedy strikes they exploit compassion and grief to induce
us to surrender yet more freedom.
