Guns are a hot topic right now. They support the battle lines of two dogmas: the ill-defined assault weapon is the devil’s spawn or the golden right to arms that needs ironclad protection. It sometimes gets to the point where any talk of guns is correlated back to either of these positions with a child-like certainty.
I have no issue with the owning of guns; in fact I am sometimes persuaded of their useful- ness. I can also understand the
sudden shock of spree-killings as something that might cause people to feel threatened. However, I think this devotion ascribed to reactions and prefer- ences is misplaced.
Some time ago, I was in a meaningless cyber battle over a miss-quote from George
Washington. My opponent was convinced that the ban on guns was a government plot to create a Ray Bradbury-esque future.
I thought that this was not the crux of the issue, but rather the fact that Americans were calling on their government, in perhaps overly emotional ways,
to protect their right to life. It struck me as interesting that he thought his right to guns was incontrovertible, and the literature completely certain of his preserved ability, but the concern his neighbors might have about deranged killers was something his scientific rights could override. To me, this seemed a measure of incompetence.
The truth is that both positions are based on emotion. Rights are written not as some fact of nature, but as an ideal preserved in writing. Like laws, they are not based on only statistics and real world applications, but on what people would like to not hap- pen. The right to bear arms and form a militia is, on one side, a practical consideration as it was the only way to have regional protection, but it was also something that appealed to the need for security.
The Bill of Rights authorizes you to be able to shoot at someone who is shooting at you. It sounds very similar to asking the government to restrict how much someone is allowed to shoot at you since, you know, that sort of thing isn’t very fun. I believe there is also a certain misconception built into the present interpretation of the Constitution. The laws of the land reflect what the people presently need. If that is the presence of informal armed forces, then that is what will be provided. If it is voting rights where there were none, so be it. However, the country has changed and, with its change, a shift in needs arose.
There is little need to protect from outside invasion and few private citizens can buy and store a howitzer. The gun owner’s enemy is not other governments or his own gone rogue, but his fellow citizen. Libel and lawyers now issue the threat that used to be issued by a highly armed community. This is a literate society where the Madoffs destroy more lives than an armed militia ever could.
The owning of guns is not, in my eyes, wrong. I cannot state this enough. It is simply that, like almost all things in the sphere of human interac- tion, gun rights are, at its core, emotional. To claim it is not is to whine over lost toys, citing how the world depends on them. Also, you have to admit, the world has changed and the gun owner, if he wants to survive, has to appeal to it.
