It’s May 2nd, and the month has already seen 20 people shot in Chicago, three of whom have already died. Philadelphia is slacking, with only four gunshot victims and no fatalities. The amount of #GunFAIL we are experiencing may not be at an all-time high, but once you stop and look at it there are a staggering number of lives being destroyed by guns on a daily basis in this society. People shoot each other and themselves, on purpose and by accident, all the damn time.
How do the people of Cumberland County, Kentucky feel about a five-year old getting a rifle as a gift from his parents which he then uses to kill his two year old sister?
US gun manufacturers market weapons for children specifically. The company which makes the gun involved in the accidental shooting has a “kids’ corner” on its website with the slogan “my first rifle”. There are photos of young girls firing pink guns.
The shooting has highlighted the cultural divide in the US over guns. The American countryside has seen little of the recent efforts in cities and suburban areas to curb gun use and tighten regulations on ownership.
“It’s a normal way of life. I mean, folks – and it’s not just rural Kentucky, it’s rural America. I mean folks hunting and fishing, it’s sports shooting – it’s just a way of life. You know, you begin at an early age, learning to use and respect a gun,” said Joe Phelps, Cumberland County Judge Executive, whose position has been described as similar to that of a local mayor.
When you tell me it’s normal to give a four or five year old child a rifle as a gift, I basically think you’re insane in the same way I would think the Chinese were insane if you told me that they hand out hand grenades instead of candy on Halloween.
If that’s your culture, there is something wrong with your culture because you are endangering children in an irresponsible way. Your two year old baby girl is dead and your five year old son’s life is ruined. Your life is ruined. But nobody could have predicted that this might happen. Local officials are reluctant to even criticize your parenting skills.
As Don King likes to say, “Only in America!”
You Godammed Eleete Lib’ruls!! None of yer high-falutin’ gun control wouda saved this child! None of it! Jeebus said it was her time to come home!! Nobody coulda done a thing about this TRAGEDY, God’s Will. No one’s life is ruined! We gave that unlucky family a new bible and they were grateful! Not like you Godless lib’ruls!
Next yer gonna tell us that 5 year old boys cain’t have rifles for their birthdays! Well, I bought my 3 year old a rifle and theirs nothin’ you can ever do about it! NOTHING! I’m free, free, damn you, to be a brainless Yahoo just like my daddy and granddaddy before me! I revel in it! Daddy once shot off Momma’s ear, but he said it was an acceedent and otherwise she was fine! Goddam freedum hatin’ lib’ruls! We’ll do what we damn well please in our child rearin’ and our old executive judge Mitchy Mac will make damn well sure that you lib’ruls can’t do anything you want to protect your lib’rul kids!
It’s a race to the bottum and we long ago beat you to it!
This shit just sends me into orbit.
Our gun culture will never change, I’m afraid. You can’t present logical, sane gun measures to a population of gun nuts. And they WILL pass their infatuation of guns on to their children.
Guns manufactured specifically for little kids, in fun colors? Gives new meaning to their “target” market, doesn’t it?
Goddam, it’s so frustrating.
You have no right to criticize, because freedom.
We. Here. Commenters on this blog. Yep. That’s pretty much true.
However our betters, the serious people in DC could do a bunch about this. Aside from reasonable regulation of firearms, that is.
They could provide jobs all over this country, providing opportunity for families to support themselves.
They could end the senseless drug war and long-term incarceration that disrupts families.
They could end the blatant racism, that puts folks both white and black on edge. And discrimination that increases the fundamental anger.
The could enforce laws on corruption that allow certain gun dealers impunity in violating current firearms laws.
They could dial back the environment of fear and anger that they stoke for political advantage.
They could confirm more judges so that the judicial process doesn’t drag on and on.
They could fully fund schools and pre-schools and higher education and mental health services and healthcare that have many different impacts on the culture of violence.
They could punish misbehaving and racist cops who use their power with impunity to victimize the less powerful.
They could stop glorifying the warrior and stigmatizing everything else as weakness.
But the moral rot of our elites is so astounding none of this is likely to happen.
“I guess we can’t do anything about this.” It’s replaced E Pluribus Unum as the national motto.
“It’s replaced E Pluribus Unam…”
LOL. Now that’s a classic!
An excellent point, too. E pluribus enum has already been replaced by fucking “In God we trust” as our nation’s motto, which I find annoying since I don’t in fact trust in God. But unfortunately there are lots of Americans who are deeply hostile to the spirit behind the nation’s real motto.
“In God We Trust” has lost out because folks finnaly figured out that the other part of the motto that should have been on the money was “All others pay cash.”
“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” would be an appropriate motto for a lot of these people.
One part of the 2nd amendment I hadn’t thought much about until recently was the bit about “the security of a free state.” So for all its ambiguities, the 2nd amendment does clearly state its intended purpose. Maybe there are people who do feel more secure and free knowing the whole country is flooded with guns, but I sure as hell don’t.
Of course, I know you’re not supposed to think about the 2nd amendment. You’re just supposed to buy guns.
The curious structure of the Second Amendment has to do with authorizing slave states to organize patrols as neighborhood militias with the major landowners as captains. It was not that all property owners (citizens) were permitted to bear arms, they were required to. There are some jurisdictions today that have passed compulsory gun ownership ordinances that are very much like the slave patrols.
So, all gun owners under this system must muster and drill once month so that the militias will be well-regulated and aimed a protecting free states (btw, another assertion of states rights).
Obviously this would mean that the second amendment was another slavery-protecting device placed within the constitution by the slave power. Slave states wanted to ensure that their slavery enforcement “mechanisms” could not be undermined by the new federal gub’mint. That aspect of its history has not been very widely argued or discussed (at least I’ve never run across it).
I had thought the principal justification and rationale for our gun amendment was the revolutionaries’ concern over tyrannical central gub’mints, having just fought a war against an imperial militarist power that had sought to suppress citizen militias with the King’s soldiers. If protecting slavery was (another) reason behind the crappy amendment, then it’s a great failure this isn’t more widely known and reported.
It was the Virginia delegates who pushed for the wording.
Of course, it’s as well known as the Founding Fathers’ actual fear of democracy and their distribution of jugs of hard cider at polling places.
Caught between Enlightenment ideals and real creditors.
That was part of it, but it certainly wasn’t the entirety. I think Hartman is overblowing this aspect of it.
My analysis:
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.
What is being protected here is the right of “the People” to maintain their own militias. That this is so is reinforced by the use of the term “bear Arms.” “To bear Arms” doesn’t mean “to own a gun.” It is a phrase that has a specifically military connotation. The guarantee of “the right of the People to keep and bear Arms” is not a guarantee of the right of private individuals to own guns, but rather of the right of the people in their collective capacity to provide for their own military defense without relying on the federal government to provide it for them.
This was deemed “necessary to the security of a free State” not because, as your average right-wing gun nut fervently believes, because the people might need guns to rise up and overthrow the federal government in a violent revolution, but because the alternative to the militia in maintaining the security of the state was a standing army. Standing armies were considered to be dangerous to liberty, because they could be used by the government against the people as well as against foreign enemies. The use of a standing army against their own people was one of the very reasons that rulers maintained such armies in the first place. That was true in the eighteenth century, and it remains true today — take a look at Syria.
The claim that “The second amendment grants an individual’s right to own guns as personal, private property” is false. So is the claim that “The Second Amendment guarantees my right not to be prevented from acting defensively, with extreme prejudice if necessary, to protect life, limb and personal property.” This is not to say that you do not have such a right, but rather that such a right is not the right that is protected by the Second Amendment.
What is important for the current discussion is that the “right to bear Arms” protected by the Second Amendment is the right of the people to avail themselves of those very “weapons designed solely for killing large groups of people and ammunition that is designed to pierce bullet proof vests, among other ordnance that been specifically designed to wreak massive amounts of havoc,” etc., that many folks would rather not be in the hands of private individuals. In other words, military-grade weaponry, the kind of weapons with which one makes war. But this right belongs to the people in a collective capacity, not as private individuals. This kind of weaponry can, in full accordance with the Second Amendment, be owned by state or possibly local governments and kept stored under lock and key in arsenals and armories, only to be handled by members of a “well-regulated Militia” (in the modern context, members of the National Guard) acting under orders in pursuance of their official duties.
And contrary to wingnut thinking, it was the OPPOSITE of preventing a “tyrannical government” from taking over. Militias went beyond defense abroad. They were similar to our police forces and utilized to quash rebellions. Why would any thinking person in power — especially the Founding Fathers, who were almost all had more wealth than God and were in power — would write in the document the means to “take them out”? It makes no sense.
Very persuasive. My only quibble would be that, as an Bill of Rights amendment, it was intended to be a limitation on the power of the (new) federal government, and thus was a response to some level of apprehension about the powers of that new government. But your “standing armies” point covers this, as the Founders were implacably opposed to them.
Of course, the second amendment has now been incorporated and applied against the very “free States” it specifies and seeks to protect, so we’re a pretty long way from any rational construction at this point in phony Conserva-history….the whole amendment has been run off the rails by the five conservative male activists masquerading as “justices”.
It’s interesting that it’s apparenlty okay to market guns to kids but not cigarettes.
but, but, but, it’s a “way of life”! The obvious logical answer is to repeal cig regulation.
Or let tobacco get its own amendment! The tobacco planters just didn’t have the slavers’ foresight!
About Chicago:
CPS closings: What can we learn from Fenger?
Is Chicago a city being set up to fail so it can be gentrified?
Detroit used to be that poster child, but now it’s totally privatized. Sure they call it a state-appointed financial manager. But the agenda is to sell public assets, use eminent domain to assemble property that has been vacant since the 1960s, sell it a fire sale prices to investors to re-gentrify the city for profit.
Gun violence. That’s just collateral damage during the transition from public services to private wealth. Let the inner suburban cities worry about that. That will cause the well-to-do folks who want safety and convenience to move back into the city. The Great Reversal, they call it.
A couple of months ago, BooMan wrote a post asking how the Newtown massacre changed our political outlook.
I wrote that I had started to think that gun control might not be a lost cause.
I feel like a *%$&ing rube.
An hour and a half after mine, and awfully similar.