I’m not opposed to guns. In case you missed that, I’ll
repeat it: I’m not opposed to guns. Period.
I like Beto O’Rourke; but he shot himself in the foot
(sic) at the Presidential debate: “Hell yes,
we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow it to be
used on fellow Americans anymore.”
He should have stopped with his set-up: “If
it’s a weapon designed to kill people on a battlefield; if the high-impact,
high-velocity round when it hits your body shreds everything inside of your
body because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on a
battlefield so that you wouldn’t be able to get up and kill one of our
soldiers. When we see that being used against children. And in Odessa I met the
mother of a 15-year-old girl who was shot by an AR-15, and that mother watched
her bleed to death, over the course of an hour, because so many other people
were shot by that AR-15 in Odessa, in Midland, there weren’t enough ambulances to get to them
in time.”
In the first place, “we” can’t take away
people’s guns, unless the 2nd amendment is rescinded. As I’ve said
and written many times, there’s no possibility—NO POSSIBILITY—of that happening. It would take a two-thirds vote
of both houses of congress even to present a proposal for rescinding.
That proposal then would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states!
Count them. Use your fingers if you need to: 13 states could defeat the
proposal to rescind the 2nd (or any other) amendment of the Constitution.
In your wildest fantasy, do you think that fewer than 13 states would vote
against rescinding the 2nd amendment? And that question presupposes prior
approval by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress! In your
wildest fantasies, do you believe that could happen?
And, about that “slippery
slope” the NRA keeps talking about: it’s hypothetical presumption—the rhetoric
of conspiracy and paranoia, “based on the theory that too many firearm
regulations could ultimately result in the loss of Second Amendment rights
entirely. Take one type of weapon designed specifically for maximum killing
impact off the shelves and next thing you know all our guns are gone.
“For me, the larger issue is not whether
AR-15s or AK-47s will be confiscated; they won’t be in my lifetime, and maybe
not ever, largely because that’s logistically and legally impossible.
California alone houses at least a million assault weapons. American firearms
are not on a slippery slope to confiscation.”[1]
Your guns are safe! Barak Obama nor Beto O’Rourke nor
anyone else is coming to take your guns. So, relax. Breathe.
I think I’ve I addressed both sides—pretty much the
entire spectrum—from Beto to the NRA. At least that’s been my attention. There
already is too much attention paid to one side to the neglect of the other.
To my friends to the left: relax. Breathe. Nobody—NOBODY—is
happy about the 302 mass shootings in the United States this calendar year. Nobody
believes it’s OK for slobbering maniacs to shoot large groups of people,
whether innocent children in schools or festive music fans attending a concert,
or unsuspecting shoppers at a mall. Senator Chris Coons (D) from Delaware said,
“I respect [O’Rourke’s] passion. Anyone who has had to sit with the parents of
victims of gun violence, parents who have lost their children, as I have, after
the Sandy Hook shooting, after the Tucson shooting. ...To sit with a parent who
has lost a child and have no answer about how we’re going to make the country
safer is a very hard experience.”[2]
My concern is that “to have no answer” status. As a
nation, we’ve made it a guns-vs-no-guns issue, while that’s not the issue!!!
The people who support unrestricted gun ownership point to mental illness and/or
sinfulness as the problem. The real issue is that everybody is pointing to “the problem,”[3] but there is no cooperative
effort, nor any apparent initiative or desire, to find a solution!
Bill Leonard, continuing from the above quote, wrote,
“No, the real tragedy of the frenzy over O’Rourke’s remarks is that the
national conversation they sparked seems more intent on saving guns than on
saving human beings.[4] …
“Other than Coons, and of course O’Rourke, I’ve not heard anyone else on
cable television or social media give serious attention to “a 15-year-old
girl,” her body shredded by gunshots, whose “mother watched her bleed to death”
waiting on an ambulance.
“Responses to O’Rourke’s comments are, I think, confirmation of where we
are as a nation in the year of our Lord(?) 2019. The American Republic seems so
bound by the Second Amendment as a ‘God given, sacred right,’[5] that mass shootings
increasingly seem a regrettable kind of collateral damage, the sad reality of
non-negotiable weaponry.”
Leonard concludes that congress “could at least fund more
ambulances.” It’s a pitiful reality check for a nation that is too focused on
guns, pro and/or con, to attempt to find solutions to the bloodbath that
seems increasingly acceptable as “collateral damage.”
That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is
my world view.
Together in the
Walk,
Jim
[1]
Bill Leonard, “Beto O’Rourke’s Debate Invective And The New ‘Back To School’
Video Are The Jeremiads Of Our Time,” Baptist News Global, September 20,
2019. This blog is but an extension of my resonation with Leonard’s column, and
his “larger issue” will be discussed below.
[2] Ibid.
[3]
Even though we can’t agree on what the problem really is!
[4] I
would add, “or restricting guns in some way”.
[5] A
direct quote from our President.
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