Saturday, December 15, 2012

Guns don't kill people...they just make it real easy to kill people.


Last Thursday ( a little over a week ago) I wrote a daily blog concerning violence in our country‑ violence with guns. In the blog I was calling for a nationwide discussion of the second amendment and what the intent of that amendment, when it was written, meant.  I decided not to publish that blog that day. Then as of yesterday, with the horrible news from the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut, I could no longer stand by without saying what I think.

I think that either:

(A) The founding fathers got it wrong when considering the second amendment or

(B) we have misconstrued what they wanted to protect by being so overboard in our protection of guns as to become stupid in our protection of our people.

In either case, I think we need a national conversation about guns and gun ownership and the Constitution.

I have been a sportsman all my life. I have hunted. I am a fairly good skeet shooter. And have over the years owned a lot of different guns. I am no longer sure I support the Second Amendment as it is being interpreted in America today. Friends of mine said, ”John you can make this a crusade. Too many guns out there. Too much control by the NRA. Too much money against you.”  Tell that to the twenty grieving parents in in Connecticut this morning. If we don’t start we will never get it done. If we take that advice my friends gave me— if we had gone down that road 150 years ago…then slavery would never have been abolished.  Wrongs have to be righted. And out-of-control gun violence must be stopped.

Lets get together and discuss guns. Rationally and without yelling and screaming. Lets discuss the code of conduct with guns and the society stung with the violence that comes about from guns. Lets find a way to end this senseless killing.

I heard a line from a movie the other night being repeated by two small boys playing in our neighborhood.  “I’m gonna put a cap in your head, man.”  One of them said. They were talking about shooting each other but the language is so loose and so street-level that the act of killing someone has been reduced to ease of spiting out a window.

The gunman in Connecticut didn’t put a cap in 26 heads. He took 26 innocent lives. There’s a big difference. One is a non-thought The other is murder. They are both acts of murder.  On the same day as the Connecticut shootings, in China a deranged man attacked 33 children at an elementary school. No one, as of this writing, was dead in that attack. Why? Because he used a knife. Knives are harder to kill people with. Knives versus guns? It is going to be a hard discussion, America. But we need to have it.

And don’t tell me guns don’t kill people.  A semi-automatic .223 Bushmaster rifle and two 9 mm’s killed 27 in Connecticut elementary school yesterday.







Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

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.”

Where was the act of a militia yesterday?

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