Martin DyckmanOn a flight some years ago, I sat next to a French lady who was coming to the United States to visit a daughter married to an American.
She was worried about her daughter’s safety in a land so conspicuously infatuated with guns.
I wonder what the lady must think of us now. Since then, the pathological demands of the gun lobby have completely cowed and conquered Congress and nearly every legislature.
The risk of being murdered here is more than four times as great as in France. Firearms spell the difference.
How long, one wonders, before Europe puts the U.S. on travel alerts, much as we warn Americans about the occasional hazards of third world tourism?
Consider:
–Georgia’s governor recently signed a “guns everywhere” bill. One citizen promptly celebrated by strolling around a children’s baseball game with a sidearm visible on his hip. Witnesses heard him say, “Look. I’ve got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
–In the same state, a shooter with an assault rifle with “bullets strapped across his chest like Rambo,” wounded at least six people at a FedEx office Tuesday before taking his own life.
–Despite intense opposition from law enforcement, the Florida House of Representatives has passed and the Senate is considering letting anyone who could legally own it carry a concealed weapon, licensed or not, anywhere during a mandatory evacuation. Another would authorize armed teachers and parents, whether properly trained or not, to “protect” schools.
–According to The New York Times, a woman whose California company is trying to market a “smart gun” — one that could be fired only by its owner — no longer answers unknown callers on account of persistent harassment. The firearms industry lobby objects that if high-tech safety devices begin to be marketed, the government will require them. So the gun lobby is now the burglar’s best friend. Who knew?
–President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general has been blocked in the Senate for daring to say — as any physician should — that gun violence is a health phenomenon in need of study.
–Torrents of ink and TV time have been devoted to the unknown fate of the 239 people aboard a vanished Malaysian airliner. But in just the United States, in just the most recent weekend, scarcely any notice was taken of the 63 people killed (including seven children) and the 194 wounded by firearms.
The toll for this year so far: 3,380 killed, 5,678 injured. We are indebted to Joe Nocera of The New York Times for keeping this dismal tally. At that rate, the firearm corpse count for 2014 will be some six times the number who perished on 9/11.
Though the relatively rare incidence of terrorism has inspired billions of dollars of spending and serious erosions of other constitutional rights, the phony “right to bear arms” has become a national insanity, a paralyzing paranoia whose result is simply anarchy.
There’s been nothing so irrational since the witchcraft craze in colonial New England.
That it is a phony right is beyond reasonable doubt. After retiring, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Retired Justice John Paul Stevens quotes Burger in his new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.
Someone should send a copy to every Florida legislator capable of reading it.
Although Stevens strongly dissented to the court’s precedent-shattering decisions that the Second Amendment is not limited to the issue of a militia, he points out that even those cases recognized only a right to own certain kinds of guns, not to carry them wherever the owner pleases.
It is an important distinction.
The amendment Stevens proposes to overcome the misunderstanding would rephrase the Second Amendment to say “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed. (Emphasis supplied.)
This would not silence the gun lobby, he admits, but it would “eliminate its ability to advance one mistaken argument.”
The same result could be had, of course, simply by electing enough politicians with enough wisdom and guts to prefer life instead of the death lobby. But that prospect, sad to say, seems as remote as adoption of the amendment itself.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, N.C. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
