Thoughts in Response to Fearful Gun Enthusiasts

My modest effort to promote a national nonpartisan discussion on a “Second Amendment for 21st Century America” has finally come to the attention of gun enthusiasts and avid defenders of the Second Amendment. 

I can only say that their recent comments have been belligerent or simple insults; one even asserted that the author of an article I retweeted should be treated with insecticide.

Let me take a minute today to respond with a few ideas and thoughts for their and your consideration, doing so without belligerence or insult, or threatening anyone with insect poison.  And let me say that there is nothing in the text that follows that threatens gun ownership for such traditional purposes as hunting, sport shooting or home defense.  The starting point is that we are all on the same team, Team America.

Let’s start to make the case for a national nonpartisan discussion by noting the famous February 19, 2021 tweet by the Congressional representative from Colorado:

“Protecting and defending the Constitution doesn’t mean trying to rewrite the parts you don’t like.”

Amazing that the elected representative did not understand that the Second Amendment itself was a part of a package of amendments (the Bill of Rights enacted in 1791) that the Founding Fathers felt was necessary to strengthen the 1789 Constitution.  Seventeen amendments followed, the last (the 27th, enacted in 1992 to limit Congress’s ability to raise its own pay) actually having been one of the draft amendment proposals not accepted into the Bill of Rights.  And there are clear provisions in the Constitution for amendments, which have been exercised 27 times successfully and still others (the Equal Rights Amendment, for example) without success.  There is even an amendment to an amendment, the 18th establishing prohibition and the 21st repealing it 14 years later.

So discussing amending or updating the Second Amendment couldn’t be more “Constitutional”.

Then there is the issue of the level of gun violence and its cost to the country.  It is irrefutably clear that the level of gun violence, and deaths by firearms (murder and suicide) in the United States dwarfs those of all other industrialized democracies.  And it is irrefutably clear that the U.S. homicide rate is 20 to 30 times greater than those of countries in Europe and Japan, with the prevalence of firearms demonstrably the reason.

So the U.S. does in fact have a gun violence problem relative to other industrial democracies where societies are much safer and there is much, much less firearm-related violence.

Then there is real impact the prevalence of guns in society is having on law enforcement and public security throughout the country.  Indeed, law enforcement is difficult, risky and dangerous work.  All too often police are put in ambiguous situations where they fear for their lives and, in some cases and in response to perceived but non-existent threats, mistakenly take the lives of innocent people.   The U.S. Department of Justice 2018 report on law enforcement stated that some 100,000 active police officers are suffering from PTSD, and this clearly affects their work and ability to police effectively within the law.   As a result, police organizations have spoken out clearly in opposition to permitless concealed carry, fearing the increased potential for violent altercations between citizens and for endangering the police.

So the prevalence of firearms in the U.S. is a pressing problem and a true and serious threat to law enforcement and public safety.  Just witness the police concerns voiced in numerous recent cases of shootings around the country. Last year, 61 officers were killed by firearms in the line of duty, up from 46 officers’ lives lost in 2020.

Moving on, there is the discussion about the impact of changes in gun laws on the level of violence, and the various statistical studies that seek to argue that such broadly supported common sense measures as firearm registration, training, limits on magazine capacities and red flag laws only marginally impact the statistics.  That sort of incremental analysis is meant to obscure the basic and dominant fact that firearms are involved in far too many homicides and far too many suicides.  Gun enthusiasts may be content with the fact that there were some 20,000 murders by firearms and 24,000 suicides in the U.S. last year.  But many people, this writer included, see those numbers as a national tragedy and embarrassment, and an unacceptable burden on the innocent victims of such violence and their families. The popularly supported measures will have a positive and needed impact.

Of course, we must recognize that mental health concerns make for a toxic and all too often fatal mix when troubled individuals have access to firearms.  And as we have seen in mass casualty events, such individuals can truly wreak havoc, with devastating effect on the innocent victims and their families and friends.  Who can argue with the urgency of preventing such from happening at all?

So if one truly cares for his friends and colleagues, for fellow Americans and their families, one would also want to see the level of firearm violence reduced.

The list goes on.  There are various studies that try to capture the scope of the economic cost of firearm-related violence, with rough estimates placing the number in excess of $200 billion dollars each year in medical costs, lost potential wages and so on. 

So gun violence is a palpable drag on the U.S. economy.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, gun violence has wrecked and distorted so many lives over the decades.  Firearm-related murders and suicides have totaled in the hundreds of thousands over a decade, with millions of people left grieving and mourning the loss of their innocent loved ones in the aftermath.  This human dimension of our national gun violence tragedy is real and deeply painful.  And it is an insidious cancer within society as a whole, as people fear that they may well become a victim while shopping at a mall, driving down a road, walking on the street, attending a movie, going to church, going to work, allowing their children to play in the yard, and many more normal, everyday scenarios, not to mention the police who are now called to interact with an increasingly armed society and are simply unable to distinguish between the bad guys and the so-called good guys.

This aspect of gun violence falls squarely on the shoulders of the gun lobby and they should take ownership of the result of their work.

These are all obvious reasons supporting the proposal for a national nonpartisan discussion of the Second Amendment.

As noted at the start, such a discussion should begin with recognition of the acceptability of traditional uses of firearms for such purposes as hunting, sport shooting and home defense.  Few people question these uses and national polling confirms this.

But national polling also confirms that a notable majority of Americans would like to see gun violence reduced so that they can live without the fear of becoming the next victim being reported on the nightly news.  A basic sense of human decency supports such reasoning.

The national discussion should focus on the simple 27 words of the amendment, words written 231 years ago by men from a long distant time, men who wrote a Constitution allowing slavery, denying women the chance to vote, and reserving the vote in most states to only propertied males.  It was a time of single shot muskets and pistols, not nine rounds a second assault rifles, and it is simply ludicrous to assert that the Founding Fathers ever contemplated mass shootings on the scale of Las Vegas as they agreed on their poorly worded Second Amendment.

Moreover, it is difficult to assert that the first 13 words of the Amendment (“A well organized militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”) make sense or are relevant in 2023, given that the Congress passed legislation in 1792, 1795, 1903 and subsequently governing the establishment of the militia and its subsequent absorption into the National Guard, where weapons are by law to be provided by the government, not individuals.

As for the notion of a militia as a defense against a tyrannical democratically elected government, it is clear that the repression of the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania by various state militias -- led by President Washington himself -- stands as proof that the state militias at the time of the Bill of Rights served at the disposal and under the direction of the government elected by the people under the same Constitution that the Congressional Representative from Colorado now insists should not be changed.

Some states are talking about reviving or standing up home state militias, with unintelligible reasoning.  I suppose that they fear a land invasion from Canada or Mexico that will overwhelm the U.S. military and law enforcement.  No, a well organized militia has nothing to do with the security of a free state in 2023.  The real and present threats to the U.S. come from major powers from across the oceans who have nuclear, chemical, biological, and cyber weapons at their disposal to launch from thousands of miles away.   Sorry militia proponents, you just don’t fit into the picture 232 years on.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to respond to those gun enthusiasts who have pushed back against the notion of a nonpartisan national discussion of the 27 words of the Second Amendment.  I can only hope that they will read this essay with non-ideological eyes and with fair, open minds and agree that to discuss is to put the country first.

Perhaps it is possible that gun owners and enthusiasts across the spectrum of political views will welcome such an important, indeed vital, discussion as part of our common effort to make our country stronger and our society safer over the decades and centuries ahead.

A final thought, it would be great to throttle back the anger and insults, we are, like it or not, all part of Team America.

With patriotism and appreciation.