Here’s something to think about: The right to bear arms is an unnecessary Amendment that exists today primarily for personal pleasure and satisfaction.
What is more, it is an NRA myth that the preservation of all other rights and freedoms depends on the right to bear arms.
None of them does. Not one, not freedom of speech not freedom of the press, not the right to assemble, not the right to petition the government, not the right to vote, none of them.
People who believe gun rights protect all other rights are living in the 19th century, right there with the NRA’s top gun, Wayne LaPiere, who just last week proclaimed this myth once again to a gathering of right wing conservatives (CPAC), only this time he went a step further.
He not only repeated the myth of how gun rights protect all rights, he deified the right to bear arms: “There is no greater personal individual freedom than the right to keep and bear arms, the right to protect yourself, and the right to survive…It’s not bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.”
That is not only a hyperbolic statement. It is false on several levels.
Unless you are a farmer or depend on hunting for food, gun ownership rights are for personal pleasure or satisfaction and nothing else. In point of fact, the right to bear arms is superfluous to all other American rights and freedoms.
We could repeal the “right to bear arms” section of the Second Amendment and nothing would change.
How do I know? The way we should know everything else about how foolish we act when it comes to guns. Other nations have strict gun laws and yet the people in those countries enjoy the same democratic freedoms we do.
Why, then, do our freedoms depend on gun ownership when no one else’s do? The answer is simple: They Don’t!
Gun rights have nothing to do with the preservation of our personal freedoms.
And that fact has profound implications for the current debate America’s teenagers are forcing the nation to have after the Parkland school shootings.
Intuitively or intellectually, they know gun ownership is a right, but not an essential one, not even a big one, a minor right in fact compared to their right to live without the fear of being shot at school, or anywhere else.
That is why they also know that the refusal to ban semi-automatic weapons and to enact other sensible gun control laws is to choose guns over their lives.
And they are exactly right!
Which is why I think it is time to shoot down (no pun intended) all the NRA propaganda about gun ownership being essential to our way of life.
Gun ownership doesn’t protect our way of life. It has become a major threat to it.
It should be hard, difficult, time consuming, frustratingly bureaucratic to be a gun owner. It should never be easy.
In the 21st century, for almost everyone except a very few, gun ownership is a hobby, a sport, a personal pleasure, but it is in no way critical to anything.
But our children’s safety is.
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