Perhaps you heard that the Supreme Court struck down the decision of lower courts to permit local cities to ban handguns. The Supreme Court says, rightfully, that this violates the Second Amendment that gives US citizens the right to bear arms. Well, yes, … of course, but …
It’s not right. Why?
We can argue intent: was the intent of the framers to bear arms so thugs could carry guns around and shoot innocent folks? I doubt that entered into their decision. But, give that point away, they knew that the right to bear arms meant that humans, cracked Eikons that they are, could and would use guns for murder. And they still framed the law so that US citizens could bear arms. Fair enough.
So, what’s my beef? Times have changed. A law designed in the 17th and 18th Centuries, emerging as it did when most used guns to hunt for food, who used guns to protect themselves from invaders, and who might need a gun should the country go to war, plain and simply is not the world in which we live and in which contemporary citizens carry guns.
Yes indeed, some folks use guns for hunting; some rely on hunting with guns to supply food for the family. Fair enough.
They’re not our problem.
Who is our problem? Let’s agree to call them thugs. Cracked Eikons who are carrying guns to kill other human beings who are unarmed.
I find no reason why reasonable US citizens can’t agree to restrict the ownership and the right to carry guns unless they have an explicitly, and approved, good reason to do so — if someone needs their shotgun to shoot some pheasants, if someone wants to hunt deer or whatever, fine — get a permit, get a gun, and get the gun stored in some safe place (protected from the public) where that person can go that place and “check it out” for hunting, and then return it to the safe place on their way home.
No one, so far as I can see, needs to have a handgun, live and loaded, on them in public. No one. But cops.
And that’s my opinion.
The Supreme Court decision is a classic example of being legal and right but dead wrong, in my opinion of course. Like the priest and levite who chose to avoid touching what they thought was a dead corpse but, in avoiding contracting impurity, missed the whole point of the law — to love God and to love others.
Everyone’s weighing on this one today. Here’s Time‘s piece.