The Second Amendment to the United States’ Constitution guarantees us the right to keep and bear arms. It is among the first and most fiercely guarded of many entitlements we claim as citizens today.
The Founders’ rationale for this privilege was that a well-regulated militia—citizens armed with their own weapons—would deter an overbearing government from using military force to remove our hard fought freedoms.
The only weapons available to private citizens in the late 18th century were flintlock guns. Armies and navies had canons, indigenous peoples fought with bow and arrow, but settlers had limited choices from which to equip themselves—and there was little need for regulating our “militias.”
Since then weapons technology has evolved spectacularly. We and our regulations have not.
Assault weapons fire bursts of steel-penetrating bullets; semi-automatic pistols readily shoot right through a house and anybody in it; and ammunition is designed to “stop” human beings dead.
Meanwhile, the private citizens buying these weapons are anything but “well regulated.”
Worse, attempts to regulate and curb indiscriminate access to weapons of mass murder are fought as though such restraints represent the beginning of our immediate captivity.
When Osama bin Laden brought terror to our shores, killing 3,000 in New York’s Twin Towers, we nearly bankrupted the Treasury, and sent tens and tens of thousands of our countrymen to spill their blood in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet when innocents—most recently blameless school children—are slaughtered by deranged men with legal access to brutal and ubiquitous weapons, we reiterate the response we make every time: “We must do something to stop the carnage.”
And we do nothing.
We tolerate serious erosions to our civil liberties—such as airport searches and email monitoring—in order to guard against terror. We invade sovereign nations that threaten us with weapons of mass destruction that are not even real.
Yet we won’t tolerate the slightest restraint of our free and reckless access to weapons of self-destruction.
We are, I fear, collectively quite mad.
High Streams: Sorting fact from belief 
I get it, I do, but a couple of thoughts: You conflate rights and privileges in the beginning of the post; the 2A was not limited to classes of weaponry inferior to that held as military infrastructure.. those changes came later in court decisions (and. parenthetically. your thought there can be read as a call to expand the range and power of weapons allowable to the militia in defense of Government- just saying); the indiscriminate-access-to-guns argument does not hold re: the CT shooting as all of the weapons were stolen after the lawful owner of those weapons was murdered by the mentally ill person; your argument re: our acquiescence to erosion of our civil liberties undercuts what I read as your call that we allow undermining of 2A rights as well; the straw analogy to Osama and the terrorists mobilizing the full force of the US Government in retribution is thin here… that is, the shooter in CT is dead and there is no one to mobilize against. Who would you have us respond to? All of the undiagnosed, unidentified mentally ill folks in the US? What about the civil liberties of those who would be violated in such a process. IMO – and this volley has grown tiresome over the past 30 years – concentrating on guns and weapons as causative culprits here is misguided, bordering on childish in the Freudian sense. I get you are disgusted and heartbroken, as am I and everyone I know. How to get our hands around people who will commit crimes before they happen, and in a way that is ethical, efficacious, constitutional? I am not sure… Will some horrors simply “just happen”? Yes Are all tragedies preventable? I think not. GE.
Thanks for your comments. The inevitability of tragedies is no excuse for not making some effort to avoid them.
Yes, we should make the effort to help and treat the mentally ill, most of whom are well known among families and within communities. Instead, we’re cutting mental health programs and threatening everyone’s civil liberties by exposing all to the consequences of gun violence.
I agree that the Second Amendment, treated literally, should provide me with, for example, ground-to-air, shoulder-launched missile systems if I’m to resist unwanted government intrusions via drones. Which is my point. It is absurd to think that we, the people, are any kind of militia, or that we should have a Constitutional right to be sufficiently armed as a fighting force.
The notion that people kill, not guns, is a tautology. As long as we insist on providing easy access to weaponry that makes killing easy, we’re going to be facing more and more of these massacres. How long must we continue this debate and the status quo?
If we’re as civilized as we advertise, must we not make some effort to assess and contain the risks that our continuing worship of guns enables?
Long sigh …. I can see we will continue to type ‘past’ one another… Karl Denninger has a good post: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=214983 Best, GE
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