As evidenced by the Elian Gonzalez incident a few years ago, if the United States government wants to come into your abode, They. Are. Coming. In. Not even cuteness and television cameras can stop them.
When the second amendment was drafted the federal arsenal consisted of the average farmer and his friends. They all had the same weapons and social contract and it behooved everyone to keep the peace.
However, there are a couple of VERY important qualitative differences between the late 18th century and 2007.
1. PEOPLE KNEW HOW TO USE FIREARMS. Children grew up working with weapons, were well-versed in their capacity for destruction and took things like marksmanship seriously.
2. Completely absent from the popular consciousness were stories, movies and television shows based around the coolness of guns and killing people. The media may not be to blame for the upshot in violent crime, but they certainly aren’t helping things by putting Uma Thurman in leather and making it look cool.
3. Firearms sprayed exactly one bullet or pellet; some, if you were lucky, sprayed buckshot. The first “repeating rifle” wasn’t invented until the late 1830s for the Mexican-American war. The drafters of our constitution had no earthly idea of the devastation that would one day be possible with the pull of a trigger.
4. The federal government was not in possession of the following: napalm, the cruise missile, a huge and ridiculously badass Marine Corps and about 500 other things designed to make any rebels nouveau seriously regret their life choices.
This list is my way of saying that the rules of gun ownership and use have changed and we either need to change with them or risk future outbreaks of heartbreaking violence such as the one that occurred on Monday on the Virginia Tech campus.
As we now know, the gunman purchased both his firearms and ammunition legally. He adhered to the Virginia law of “one gun a month per person” and purchased his first automatic assault weapon in February and his second in March from a dealer and his ammunition (again, legally) on eBay.com.
Now, as a person gifted with an average amount of common sense, there are several things about Virginia gun laws that shock and awe me, but before I go on, I should make clear that while Virginia gun laws are lax, thanks to the N.R.A. and other powerful firearm lobbies and the immense military industrial complex; gun laws in most other states barely approach anything even approaching intelligent.
Back to Virginia, in this lovely state that bumps up right against our nation’s capital, according to statistics provided by the Brady Campaign, there is NO MANDATORY: waiting period on a handgun, safety course, ballistic fingerprinting, registering with police, child-safety mechanisms, licensing or permit, limitations on Saturday Night Specials (the name given to the “junk handguns” used to commit most “crimes of passion,” usually against women or brown people: by other brown people).
But before you get too pleased with yourself, Washingtonians, in your fine state, in which this past four-day break a good friend of mine watched a man get shot in broad daylight in downtown Seattle, you are barely any better about your gun control. Again, according to the Brady Campaign, in Washington there is NO MANDATORY: ballistic fingerprinting, Child Access Prevention liability, license or permit, limitations on Saturday Night Specials, registration, safety training, child safety mechanisms and non-law enforcement persons with concealed weapons licenses may carry their weapon into school zones. Also like Virginia, mandatory background checks are not necessary if you head over to the local gun show for your new weapon.
Isn’t it time we upped our standards for deadly weapons that can end an obscene amount of life in seconds? It takes a month to get driving privileges through the state. Can’t all of our states up the requirements of gun ownership to at least that of a car?
