Guns a Go Go

I haven't posted in a long time.  I should have known that a story about a shooting would have pissed me off enough to get back to my keyboard.

Dateline, White Settlement, TX: December 29th.

Sunday church services.  Nut waltzes in and kills two people with a shotgun.  Within six seconds, he's shot and killed by an armed congregant.  Naturally, the gun rights people are loving this.  Which is a little disturbing.

I've made no secret over the years that I'm not a fan of guns or the Second Amendment.  I've long believed that a law written back when neither automatic weapons nor streetlights had been invented probably shouldn't give cart blanche to any nut to own deadly weapons.  In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court said the same thing in 1938.  United States vs Miller:

In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158. The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. 'A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.' And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time. 

(emphasis above is mine)

Got that? The Supreme Court itself said that the whole "well-regulated militia" part of the amendment kind of mattered. It wasn't always the position of the court that any Tom, Dick and Harry could own a private gun for himself. It wasn't until 2008 that the Court made a ruling that made individual rights more solid in this area. Which, is fine. I don't like it, but opinions change. Laws change.


But I made the tactical error of posting in a comment section on Facebook this week (a brilliant fuck move) that if you're celebrating the whole "good guy with a gun" mantra, you're ignoring the fact that a bad guy killed two people FIRST. Liberals don't deny -- despite right-wing talking points to the contrary -- that situations never occur where a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. It happens a lot. Only a fool would deny that. But I'm a math guy. If you're a gun rights person, a situation where a gun crime is stopped with a gun is, well... a wash at best. Yeah, a gun disarmed (pun very much intended) a situation, but it wouldn't have been necessary if not for the presence of the first gun.


When people like me suggest that we need tighter restrictions on guns, like background checks, or having to register your gun, we're not trying to take guns away from responsible law-abiding people who use them for self-defense. We're trying to reduce the number of situations where those weapons are NEEDED for self-defense by limiting the number of creeps with bad intentions who are able to get their hands on weapons.


And there are easy things we can do. Make it a requirement that every gun has to be registered, and have harsh penalties for people who don't keep track of them. Every gun used in a crime should be able to be traced back to an owner. That way, you can't escape responsibility if you loan or sell a gun to an unscrupulous person, and law enforcement can get one step closer to finding out who had it last. I mean, if you have to register your dog, you should have to register deadly instruments that can kill people. I've never heard anyone say "The government's going to take our dogs!!"


And in the interest of civility, I was called an idiot (ironically, by people who couldn't spell or use punctuation -- ShortBus will be around to pick you up tomorrow), an imbecile, and best of all -- a commie. A commie. Haven't heard that one in a while. One guy went so far as to say he wished that some day, I'd find myself in a situation where I needed a good guy with a gun. Thanks, wholesome Christian do-gooder. I have a different opinion than you, therefore you hope I find myself in life-threatening peril sometime. Nice. I can't stand climate change deniers, but I would never look at one of them and say "I hope your whole family gets killed in a tornado." Or tell an anti-vaxxer "I hope your daughter gets smallpox."


Mostly, I had people getting upset because I was trying to take away rights given to them by God. Oh boy, here we go. First off, there is no God. Those rights were given to us by men who wrote the Constitution. You know, the men who owned slaves while saying "all men are created equal." Those infallible gents. But, theological beliefs aside, the objection was that I was trying to take rights away from people that have been around since the country got started, which is completely untrue. We went about seven decades with the top court in the land saying that individual citizens didn't have any absolute right to own a gun outside of the militia.

Look. I don't know what the solution is for the epidemic of gun violence we have. But what we're doing isn't working. All I can do is go back to where I started: If you're viewing an incident where three people were killed by guns as some kind of positive, that's a pretty fucked up starting point. Don't tell me we can't do better.