Gun control attempts

 

The attempts at controlling the guns in 21st century America comes a day late and a dollar short.  With millions of guns already in the hands of millions of people in America, with tens of thousands of them in the hands of criminals who would never give them up, how can it be possible to impose a gun law that bans the guns?  In the first place even if the gun dealers were to stop making the guns and all sales ended today, there would still be millions of guns in the hands of people all over the country.  Not only that, but guns are available from countries all over the world.  If a person really wanted to have a gun it would not be difficult to obtain one.

 

Gun ownership is in the DNA of most Americans.  Every American has grown up with the culture almost demanding the ownership of guns.  Of course the most important foundation of gun ownership is planted right in the United States Constitution.  But even aside from that, Americans have been socialized in a society and culture where guns have been part of the life cycle.  To remove the guns from Americans is like removing the sugar or the eggs from the baked cake.  Individual preferences and world-views have been "baked" into the mind-set of most Americans relative to gun ownership; the right of ownership.

 

If politicians wanted to remove the rights of ownership of guns from private citizens in America they should have started just after the American Revolution.  It should have started with George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Of course it couldn't have started then because those men believed in what they had written in the Constitution.  The states believed in the Constitution and the Amendments as well since it was ratified by each of the states.  By the nineteenth century guns in American households were as staple as the carcass of meat hanging in the smoke house. 

 

During the nineteenth century guns played a major role in settling the nation from the East to the West.  Another war with Great Britain was fought in the War of 1812, land was wrestled from the Native American people who occupied the land, a Civil War was fought and the "wild west" was won.  Anyone who believes that guns were not a part of that conquest failed all of their American History classes in school.

 

By the twentieth century, America spent most of the time fighting World Wars and various "police actions" that rose up heroes who had used guns to accomplish those feats.  American patriotism consisted of parents, grandparents, uncles and brothers telling the stories over and over of the freedoms and independence fought and died for throughout each generation.  Melded into that freedom and independence was the gun riding in each holster strapped around each waist of each of those men telling the stories.  Sons, and even daughters, grew to respect and revere those stories and even learned through schools that the heritage of America had been settled by defending individual rights by the sacrifice of blood.

 

Now, in the twenty-first century the politicians believe they can simply remove the guns from people whose ears are ringing with the voices of their cumulative ancestors who are still from their graves marching to the drum-beat of the message of freedom and independence with rights that were wrestled from tyrants whose sole objective was to disarm and subjugate their posterity; those of us living today.  The politicians of today have a more difficult task than they have counted on; they not only have to disarm the current citizens, they have to disarm all of the ancestors of the current citizenry.  That is an impossible task outside of a complete take-over through a dictatorial armed rebellion against the Constitutional government.

 

It is unlikely that level of insurrection could be accomplished in America with generations of Constitutional checks and balances.  That doesn't mean some politicians won't try to disarm Americans; they will eat away at the second amendment ever so slowly with little nibbling laws, regulations and Executive Orders.  They will scold the American citizen into submission through movies, public service announcements, endless hearings with witnesses who have experienced tragedy by losing loved ones.  They will appeal to a sense of logic that bears out the fact that guns are dangerous in the hands of people with mental illnesses.  There is one thing they forget.

 

Those politicians forget that the "Militia" that is discussed in the United States Constitution does not always mean an organized, government-sponsored military that is used to fight off the attackers from outside our borders.  It also means the individual or small group of neighborhood individuals who have been overrun by thugs, gangs, robbers, criminals and just plain bad people who want to commit crimes and kill people.  Protection from harm can be an individual endeavor.  Sure, the official police and law enforcers are there for protection and to maintain order, but in every state, city, town or village the law enforcers are outnumbered by the thugs and gangs. 

 

Being outnumbered, the official police and law enforcement agencies cannot be in all places under all circumstances.  Therefore, the Constitution of the United States provides the provision for individual citizens to protect themselves as they pursue the practice of their rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  The "Militia" can be an individual in that context, or a small group of neighbors who are protecting their lives and property from those whose intent is to kill and destroy.

 

Jim Killebrew