Random Acts of Writing: Making the world a safer place
By Craig Carter
Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:00 AM PDT
“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.”
For those of you who don’t know, and a thousand shames upon you if you don’t, that’s the Second Amendment of the Constitution. It’s a fairly comma-happy amendment whose meaning has come under a lot of scrutiny since the Supreme Court’s recent decision that struck down Washington, D.C.’s 30-year-old handgun ban. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion was the amendment does indeed guarantee your right to own a handgun, while those who don’t agree with the decision argue the Founders had a “militia” in mind. Which means everyone has a bunch in their knickers about the Founders’ intent. I think if we threw that amendment into the wastebasket, nothing in the world would be harmed. It’s clumsily written, it’s far too vague for its own good and it’s just way too open to silly interpretation. Which I’m sure a lot of you will take to mean I think the government should take guns away from people or ban them. Au contraire!
Having lived in the rural Northwest all my life, most of the gun owners I’ve known have been law-abiding citizens who would never dream of using their rifles, shotguns, antique muskets, air rifles, you name it, to hurt another person. As such, I’m the last person in the world to tell them, “Hey, because evil people do bad things with guns, I don’t think you should be allowed to own one.” Isn’t that kind of like saying because child molesters use computers to prey on children, we should ban everyone from owning one? It ain’t the tool that’s the problem. It’s the insufferable tool wielding the tool we have to address. However, the gun issue prompts some silly ideas. For instance, a CBS news program recently reported “30,000 people were killed last year by handguns.”
Yes sir, those evil handguns just walked up to 30,000 people and killed them. I was unaware that guns no longer required a human finger to pull the trigger, but there it is. Evil handguns are just willy-nilly killing folks. The fiends! On the other side, Mr. LaPierre of the NRA would have you believe there are millions of old ladies that are alive and kicking today because they had a handgun on the nightstand when Mr. Burglar came to call. I don’t know why, but Wayne never bothered to compile statistics as to how many old ladies who didn’t know a firing pin from a rolling pin shot themselves in the face, foot, arm, leg, whatever, trying to get the safety off when the suspicious noise they heard in the kitchen turned out to be a combination of the house settling and the cat playing with a discarded milk bottle cap.
But when you get right down to it, I wasn’t disappointed with the Supreme Court for striking down the D.C. gun ban as much as I was disappointed no one bothered to address the folly of telling law-abiding citizens they can’t own something, or taking something away from law-abiding citizens, because law-breakers often misuse that something.
Which in essence means I didn’t oppose the D.C. gun ban on Second Amendment grounds. I opposed it on Fourth Amendment grounds. Taking guns away from, or denying gun ownership to law-abiding citizens, falls more under the Fourth’s “unreasonable search and seizure” provision than it does any dubious interpretation of what the framers of the Second had in mind when they wrote of well-regulated militias.
More than that, though, the idea that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens is going to stop criminals from using guns violates all common sense. Like I said before, it ain’t the tool that’s the problem. It’s the insufferable tool using the tool we have to address, and until we properly do that, handgun bans (and handguns themselves, for that matter) aren’t going to make us any safer.
Craig Carter, an Ontario resident, writes a bi-weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Carter can be directed to: Craig Carter, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario OR, 97914
Ray Dickerson wrote on Jul 12, 2008 7:42 PM: