July 16, 2012
Like many of us, I’ve been worried about the gun violence in my city. These news stories have caused me to revisit the insanely primitive Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment is very short. Its use of commas and capital letters is funky. To put it mildly.
Nevertheless, our current Supreme Court has determined that the Second Amendment guarantees every individual the right to own guns. Many states, bought and paid for by the NRA, have (hrmph) manfully taken up the cause and are legislatively insisting that everyone must own guns. And carry them in the open, fully loaded.
You know, Florida and its good ole boys like George Zimmerman, those protectors of the peace.
In order to develop a rational discussion about guns, we need to begin at the beginning. Here’s the entire Second Amendment:
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.
Whew, typing that out took a lot of work! And you do see what I mean about the commas, right? And do you believe how …. I dunno … how slim — no, actually, really anorectic it is? Nothin’ much there.
As a smart liberal, I view this so-called guarantee of gun ownership for everyone as a hysterical concession to contemporary mass paranoid psychosis, which has been ginned up by the same people who make a lot of money out of it. (UPDATE: also erectile dysfunction and concomitant phallic replacement syndrome stuff. Which I’m surprised to find I didn’t include in my first version because it’s so, so obvious. I mean, did you look at those critters in Charlottesville?)
I mean, my home town, New York City, does not live in terror of those home invasions with which citizens of America’s Heartland seem to be eternally afflicted. (Who are those hordes who constantly invade Heartland homes anyway? Are they the very same unregistered hordes who invade election precincts, committing voter fraud left and right?)
Although I am deeply concerned about the spate of gun violence in my city, I’m pretty sure having everyone owning a gun will not produce a reasonable solution. And thanks to the stats, we all know for certain than NYPD random stops and searches find almost no guns. This unconstitutional policy is provably not a remedy—for anything, let alone illegal gun possession and violence.
What will stop the gun violence would be … I don’t have to spell this out, do I? Fewer guns. Or even n.o. g.u.n.s. My own suggestion for the NYPD is interdiction. I.e., since we know where all these illegal guns are coming from, write a law that permits random police stops and searches of cars with license plates from Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, any state that allows weaponry to be openly sold to anyone.
A friend I was visiting in Savannah took me to a huge flea market. (He loves to roam among chatchkes and boy in Southern flea markets there are chatchkes.) There were a lot of funny things. And a lot of unamusing items.
I’m still struck by how horrified I was when I saw what we’ve all been reading about for a long time now: the open gun shows. Hand guns under glass cabinets, large guns — machine guns, rifles, big things that looked as if they’d been ripped off a Men in Black film set. And the proprietors of this mass murder collection were such caricatures, I don’t even have to describe the tattooed red-neckery to you. Oh, yeah, and they all wore matching red bandanas, I swear. (UPDATE: how many of these characters do you think were in Charlottesville carrying heavy weaponry?)
Nothing like strolling through a Georgia gun show to turn a northeast liberal into a … Right.
Well, on behalf of all of us who have such perturbations about the Second Amendment and have ranted our lungs out at the tyrannical power of the NRA over our elected officials, I’ve done some scholarly reading. And I have come to the disturbing conclusion that, at least until we can repeal the Second Amendment (and when will that be?) just as we did the 18th, we should accept this gun-packin’ right as inviolate. Boys Bearing Bazookas and Bombarding Bambi must be permitted to brandish their surrogate phalluses.
But nothing in the Second Amendment says anything about regulation, except to incorporate a need for it in that very first phrase, “A well regulated militia …” So let’s put those BBBs (see above) to work. Y’awl.
Congress is, as you know, responsible for creating legislation to respond to contemporary needs. Since they’re pretty busy right now, getting ready for November elections and saying “no” to anything the Obama Administration and Democrats propose, I’ve helped them out by writing a new Act that should take care of this whole problem. I call it …
THE ONE GUN/ONE CHILD ACT
- Anyone who buys a gun must register that gun.
- Anybody who buys and registers a weapon, whatever his age, will simultaneously be registered for the National Guard and will be regulated by his state National Guard — attending mandatory weekend training camps and running around in the woods carrying his very own gun — and will be commanded by his state governor whenever needed in times of disaster, and by the United States Commander in Chief in times of war.
- You want lots of guns? For every gun you buy and register, you must supply a family member for the National Guard.
- You tell me your kid is too young right now? Old enough to shoot a gun, too young to fight a war? That’s OK. You’ve bought a superfluous gun, you’ve promised your kid, male or female, for future National Guard enrollment.
- Your wife isn’t an unrestricted gun owner, either. Gun for wife, wife for war.
- If you want to own a huge number of guns, better have a huge number of relatives.
- Anybody found with an unregistered gun will be immediately conscripted into the regular army, never mind National Guard, to serve for the minimum term required, and sent wherever. Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, South Sudan, maybe. North Korea.
- If your gun, registered or unregistered, is discovered to have participated in a crime, you will be tried alongside the alleged criminal and will receive an equal sentence.
What do you think? Let me know.