Television has become the dominant news medium, following from the live televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald.
In March, 1968, I turned 18 barely a month after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Within 3 days I reported to my draft board and registered, otherwise a deputy Sheriff would have come to my high school to escort me to the bus station and a free trip to Ft. Benning, Georgia, but I digress. At my recently desegregated high school, I enjoyed my deferment. The only times I remember thinking about such violence was after watching the nightly news.…
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26 - STM
Doc: "For him, the intent of the Second was that even prisoners, small children and the insane shouldn't be denied access to guns."
Yeah, I remember that bloke ... he got it from both barrels from us. Pun intended. What a nut. That kind of thing is half the problem.
The thing is, the founding fathers - or some of them, anyway - are on record as having said that the constitution should be changed as future Americans see fit, and as it suits the changing face of the future nation. That might be now.
The right to bear arms had existed, as Tommy says, in the laws of the colonies; they inherited the English Bill of Rights. We inherited that in Australia too. I grew up around guns, and believe people should have the right to keep them but with some reasonable controls. Our right-wing government thought so too after the Port Arthur massacre (35 dead and dozens wounded including, ironically, some visiting US tourists).
Lo and behold, since the ban on semi-automatic weapons and tighter controls on handguns, there hasn't been a mass shooting - and we previously had them with the same kind of monotonous regularity as the US. (The crims are still killing each other, but it's different.) Mind you, Aussies generally don't have any real fear of their governments even if they don't like them, so any parallel with the US isn't totally accurate.
On Tommy's view regarding the laws existing prior to them being enumerated in the constitition: It's interesting, because in the other places that had those laws, they've been watered down and there are far less shootings in those places.
While the English laws only guaranteed protestants the right to bear arms given the machinations of the Spanish and French absolutists to strip the rights of ordinary men and return England (then Britain) to Catholic absolutism in religious and political affairs, it still would have covered 99.9 of Americans at that time. (And 99 per cent of non-convict early white settlers to Australia, too.)
It should be noted on that score that the fear of Catholicism had also spread to the Americas and many of the early non-protestant Irish immigrants to America, even after the revolution when they came in droves, weren't that popular, either.
The way I read it, only the 9th amendment of the Bill of Rights (which might be of use in resolving this issue) had no precursor in the laws of the colonies, although one could argue the opposite given parliament's record of continuously laying down new laws that set out clearly on paper extra rights expected to be handed on to ordinary men.
The problem is that this debate has become so polarised in the US, no one is willing to go out on a limb and add some controls that can't be undone by the states or the courts depending on who's in power at the time (so much for an indepedent judiciary in the US).
I joke, mostly, about the world's best-known dangling participle, even though it is bizarre and leads to infinite, circular arguments about the real intent, but the issue is in the fact that it's in the constitution at all.
Whatever anyone thinks about the continuing veracity of it, it was written 200 years ago. In the absence of a crystal ball, how could the founding fathers have known that by 2011, there would be nearly 300 million, multi-shot and rapid-fire weapons owned legally by citizens of the US? And if Americans think there's no link between the easy availability of legal firearms and the proliferation of illegal firearms in the US, they need a reality check. I can understand, however, given the latter, why it is people might believe they need to protect themselves. The thing is, the shooting stats in the US don't back that up.
The founding fathers simply couldn't have known at the time what the result of their words would be in 2011 because the situation was so different as to not even invite comparison to how it's panned out in the 21st century, and I'd bet London to a brick that if they understood the kind of carnage their words on a bit of paper would bring about, they'd have given themselves an out clause by rewording it.
Perhaps that's what the scary 9th amendment is really all about, which says what it says. (Essentially, these may not be your only rights). There's no reading between the lines on that one, despite attempts to do so.
Maybe too that's why legislators and the courts have all but forgotten it. Too dangerous, too controversial, to rock the constitutional boat, even if it is part of the constitution. Or should that be vote, rather than boat.
I know what the real problem is over there: Too much navel gazing about rights, too little real action, a bizarre belief that words written on a piece of paper 200 years ago is the holy grail and a message from God rather than a document written by fallible men, too much hot air (especially in Washington), not enough balls to actually do something when the ice-cream's hitting the fan because it might cost votes, and too many blowhards at either end of the political spectrum dictating to the majority.
So you get those tired old lines like: "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner ..."
I say the current version in America is like two sheep and a wolf arguing over what's for dinner and the wolf adding that he's going to derail the majority vote because America isn't a democracy, it's a republic under a constitution. The fact his teeth are sharper probably helps, too.
But it's not true that America is not a democracy. The ancient-Greek ideas no longer apply and democracy means something else in modern usage, and America is every bit as much a democracy as any other modern democracy. If it's not, then it's dudding itself.
It's just that too many in America - especially the coon-skin hat brigae - will argue it's not a democracy, or shouldn't be. Which essentially means that while it might have the appearance of being one, it's stuck back in the late 1700s when it actually wasn't a democracy and will stay there until someone has enough balls to say in regard to guns: "Enough, it's completely out of control - we're doing something, and doing it across the bioard so there are no outs in state legislation."
Until someone has the balls to express the perfectly reasonable view that commonsense national controls on firearms - as opposed to a total ban on guns - is not infringing the right to bear arms, and in the 21st century is the only way of dealing with it.
On this score, I see America as having painted itself into a position from which there is little chance of escape, as weak, as a laughing stock among some of the more enlightened western nations, and ridiculously clinging on to the letter of a 200-year-old law that has passed its use-by date.
I believe citizens have a right to keep firearms. Proliferation on the scale of the US is something else again. Who really needs an AK with a folding bayonet in the broom closet in this day and age?
And of course, there's that other right, too, that everyone forgets about: the right not to have lunatics taking pot shots at you while you go about the ordinary course of your day or night.
27 - Tommy Mack
Blame the NRA and its money for the unfortunate rise in handgun and ammunition production the demand for which manufacturers are hard pressed to meet. (Sorry about the dangle.)
Thanks, STM, for such a thoughtful post. You are correct about the gun control debate being polarized. However, “no one [being] willing to go out on a limb and add some controls that can't be undone by the states or the courts” is only part of the situation. One has to consider the NRA.
The National Rifle Association is the largest [has the most money] single-issue lobby in the US. There is a Democratic member of Congress planning to introduce legislation to stiffen the laws around the type of semi-automatic pistol used in the Tucson shootings, but it will never get legs because of NRA influence in Congress and on American public opinion.
In fact, Gallup reports that “trends on gun control show that Americans have grown less supportive of strengthening gun laws in the United States over the last two decades, notwithstanding a number of tragic gun attacks during that period.”
Gallup reports that Americans “are also less likely to say there should be a law banning the possession of handguns except by the police and other authorized persons.”
The Constitution has been interpreted by the Court to say that Americans cannot be disarmed by the government(s). The Constitution says that the “right” shall not be” infringed.” The NRA panders us by claiming that regulation is infringement. They are knowingly wrong, but they have the money and money makes the rules.