Raymond Hobbs’s emotional rant about gun control showed up on my Medium front page. I understand the anguish that drives it. It’s quite upfront about being emotional. Still, Hobbs lets his emotions get in the way of understanding basic facts.
Herewith, some calm, unemotional, factual responses:
- Yes, you can indeed change the constitution by adopting an amendment. It’s been done 27 times so far. Now, take a look at what it would take to adopt an amendment purporting to make gun bans legitimate (I’ll come back to that in a moment). You’d need to get 2/3 of both houses of Congress to propose such an amendment. Then you’d need to get it ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures, or 38 of them (37.5, rounded up). Do you really think this is a possibility?
Further, there’s the inconvenient fact that long-settled law says that the Bill of Rights does not grant rights; it recognizes rights that are fundamentally inherent in every free citizen. Revoking the Second Amendment would not make it legitimate for government to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. - “Well regulated”, at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, did not mean “regulated” in the 20th century sense. The rise of the administrative state with its masses of regulations is very much a recent thing. “Well regulated”, in 1789, meant “well equipped and well-trained, working well”. One might say a clock that kept accurate time was “well regulated”.
And if you think it’s relevant that the Founders had only muskets instead of AR-15s, to that, I have only this to say:
- No, the Orlando gunman was not on a watch list. He beat his wife. There are claims he had mental illness, but was he ever formally found mentally ill? The simple fact is that he bought his guns legally after passing background checks. Background checks are not the panacea you think they are.
Even if he had been, should being on an FBI watch list be enough to disqualify someone from buying a firearm? Would you accept denying any other Constitutional right based on the word of one government employee? That’s all it takes to get on an FBI watch list. Getting off of it is nearly impossible. Even if you add a judicial review mechanism, all the government has to do is say that they have classified information that says you’re a threat. Can you see it so you can rebut it? Of course not, it’s classified! If you don’t believe me, look at how hard it was for one woman to get off the no-fly list after being placed there wrongly. It took her years and several court battles.
You say that the Orlando gunman should not have had access to a gun. Never mind that he worked as a security guard for a company that provides armed guards to federal, state, and local governments and had done so for the last nine years. How, exactly, would you stop him? - Of course the black market isn’t a place. It’s just an expression for people selling contraband illegally, outside of government control or notice. Criminals buy black market guns all the time; in fact, the overwhelming majority of guns used in crimes are purchased on the black market, not through gun stores or at gun shows. Yes, most of those sales, being as they are to folks with felony records, are illegal. You honestly think criminals would let a little thing like a law get in their way?
Countries with strict gun control laws have terrorist attacks. Like, say, France, which has some of the strictest gun controls on the planet. Didn’t stop the Bataclan attack.
I would rather he not buy a firearm at all. The problem is that there’s simply no way to stop him if he is sufficiently determined. - “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." This is as true today as it was when Ben Franklin wrote it. It’s even more true when you only buy a false sense of safety with your sacrifice of an essential liberty.
- We don’t really regulate Sudafed more tightly than we regulate firearms. You don’t need a background check or a waiting period to get Sudafed. Not only that, but there is no Constitutional right to keep and bear effective decongestants. (As opposed to that phenylephrine crap. Does that work for anyone at all? Certainly doesn’t work for me.)
- The Orlando attack was indeed committed by a religious extremist. But you left out a relevant point: the religion was Islam. He wasn’t radicalized and encouraged to kill gay men by the NRA. He was radicalized and encouraged to kill gay men by a fundamentalist Muslim preacher who spent time in prison. Blaming the NRA for the Orlando attack is like blaming the AAA for someone willfully driving a car into a crowd of schoolkids.
Yes, the victims of the attack were chosen because they were gay. Killing people for their sexual orientation is abhorrent, no matter the means. And the attack was political: it was a political statement in praise of the Allah of Islam, nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, we should mourn the victims and cry with their families. But the better way to respect them and say “no more!” is to make sure we have the means to stop an attack like that before it becomes mass murder. The attack only ended when good guys with guns showed up, three hours and 49 lives after it began. If just one of the patrons inside that club had been armed, the story may well have turned out much different. If several were, it almost certainly would have.
Groups like Pink Pistols understand the reality: we all, especially LGBT people, must take responsibility for our own safety. Our society needs more armed law-abiding citizens, not fewer. Gun control is a distraction from the real problem: violence in all its forms. We should fight not to disarm the law-abiding, but to make everyone safer by allowing the law-abiding to arm themselves for their and our safety.
That is how we respect and honor those wrongfully killed: by taking meaningful steps to ensure that no more are.
