Guns Part One

After the Newtown shooting, guns took center stage for the political debate in this country. I was actually suprised by the nation's reaction. After all, not even the grievous wounding of a Congresswoman and the slaying of a nine year old girl was enough to spur the country to action. But apparently we found our tipping point. It takes the blood of babies put on schoolrooom walls, but it looks like America has finally had enough.


Now, I should preface all of this by saying I am not anti-gun. I grew up in rural Missouri. I understand that hunting is an intrinsic part of the culture and even a means of getting by for many families here and throughout the country. I also understand the desire to own a handgun for personal protection. I don't have a problem with that. But there is a world of difference between a rifle or a handgun and a military grade assault weapon.


What's frustrating for me is the multitude of poor arguments being made against gun control. And the stupidity of the people freaking out about any new strictures on guns has me worried. One of the news networks had a guy on there screaming about Hitler and Stalin and then in a feverish rage declaring that 1776 would arrise again if the try to take our guns!!!


Okay... Two things. One: Chill the fuck out. Two: If you really think that some reasonable new gun laws are equal to anything Hitler or Stalin did, I don't feel that you are mentally stable enough to be owning ANY guns, much less the arsenal that you no doubt have stashed away in your bunker at home.


This is the problem with the gun nuts in our country. They view the 2nd Amendment as a free for all, without bothering to use the historical time frame in which it was written. When the 2nd Amendment was written, we had no standing army. Joe Schmoe working the fields had to be ready to go fight at a moment's notice. The only reason we won our independence was because we had a heavily armed populace. But it's not like that now. We have a standing military to protect our citizens and go fight our battles. We have citizens and we have soldiers. There is a divide between those roles now, whereas there wasn't back then. Also consider the kind of hardware that existed back then. We were in an age when practical uses for electricity were just becoming a reality. Guns were clunky, ball and musket affairs that took minutes to load and were about as accurate as you'd expect them to be. You know what they considered a "massacre" back then? The Boston Massacre, a key element to starting the revolution was the slaying of five men and injuring of six others. You know how many soldiers fired into a crowd to achieve that? Nine. With nine people firing into a crowd, only five died and six were wounded. That was the kind of firepower they had back then. What do you think the drafters of the 2nd Amendment would say if they knew that we would someday have guns that could fire literally hundreds of rounds per minute? And that these guns would be powerful enough to kill with every round fired?


The gun nuts talk about their need for these powerful weapons like they are the only ones standing between us and a tyrannical government. But this is a delusion. Newsflash: We have an army that has flying automated death bots. The army has surface to air missiles, various nerve and chemical gasses, and if all else fails, an atomic or hydrogen bomb. What fantasy world are these people living in that they honestly think they could go toe to toe with the US military and win? If our government really wanted to crush us as a population, then they could do so without batting so much as an eye. No amount of personal firepower would be able to stop them.