The Wrongologist

The Daily Escape:

Hocking Hills Region SP, OH – May 2022 photo by Victoria Williams

There’s nothing more to say about how wrong it is when school kids are killed. There was a time when we might have thought that a mass shooting at an elementary school would have been the final straw. Randomly gunning down children in front of their classmates who had to witness the carnage, the horror endured by the families of the victims should have been enough to shock America’s collective conscience into action on guns.

But it wasn’t. The killers have kept going into schools and have continued to have their twisted say. And so have the members of the Senate, who will not lift a finger to try and end gun violence in America.

This is the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. Wrongo wrote about Newtown back in 2012 when this blog was young, saying that the Second Amendment Absolutists:

“…need to balance for us the permanent loss of so much potential with the impatience of a waiting period, a background check, or the loss of the ability to fire more rounds per minute.”

So far, there have been 199 mass shootings this year (defined as three people shot, excluding the shooter), and the year is only 21 weeks old. We talk about the Second Amendment, but what would the founders say if they understood the extent to which it has so crippled our ability to deal with home-grown gun carnage?  From Hal Gershowitz:

“Two hundred and thirty-one years ago, the founders who gathered in Philadelphia to write our Constitution were all wary of the dangers of a standing army. They all knew that standing armies in Europe…were used by ruling monarchies to repress their people. Nations…that maintained standing armies used them primarily to keep their people in check. The founders all embraced the idea of a citizenries’ right to bear arms and their right to establish militias as a bulwark against a standing federal army that might repress them.”

Gershowitz reminds us that gun ownership hasn’t changed:

“According to the first US census conducted in 1790, there were just under 680,000 families or households in the new country. Almost every household owned a musket, so the country was well-armed and well-protected should the newly formed American republic go rogue.”

He says that at the time of the Constitutional convention in 1791, The US only had a standing army of about 800 men and probably about the same number of muskets. Thus, the armed households of the country far outnumbered the armed army of the new republic. Just like today.

Yet the Supreme Court endorses Second Amendment Absolutism. Their Conservative supermajority is about to dramatically expand the scope of the Second Amendment and prohibit us from protecting our communities by enacting gun safety laws through the democratic process.

Today in our town in Northwestern Connecticut, there were feverish calls by parents to arm our teachers, and station police permanently in our schools. The urge to protect kids is understandable, but it doesn’t square with the facts. Perry Stein of the WaPo reported that two Uvalde Texas police officers and a school resource officer were present and fired at the shooter, but it did not stop him from entering the building.

So what can be done? Among the most basic purposes of government is to protect its citizens. Most people accept this even though it causes inconvenience and some loss of personal freedom.

You can’t take your bottle of water, your giant hairspray can (or your handgun) through security at the airport. It’s inconvenient and an abridgement of your rights, but the greater good requires that abridgement to protect all passengers against the threat of a terrorist, whether foreign or domestic.

We could change our gun laws. Start by looking at Canada, which requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them. While this could be done on the state level, if any other state has very liberal gun purchase laws, your state will remain awash in guns. We need a national law, and a national law requires Senate action.

But the Senate won’t act on gun control. This should give you some perspective:

History says that we have a Second Amendment to protect us from a renegade standing army, one that has never existed in America. Today, Second Amendment Absolutism has left us without any effective means to control, regulate and, yes, “infringe” upon the acquisition of handguns, long guns, and semi-automatic machine guns in America, where we now have more than 400 million in the hands of the well-armed citizenry.

The Senate will only change if we elect Senators with moral courage!

Let’s close with a tune by the Drive-By Truckers “Thoughts and Prayers”: