There is no widespread support for repealing the Second Amendment, but every time there's a high-profile shooting some anti-gunners inevitably use the tragedy to push for getting rid of our right to keep and bear arms.
I've seen numerous posts on social media demanding that we give up those rights in order to protect innocent schoolchildren, as well as several letters to the editor in various newspapers, like this one that recently appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal. ....
It is now way past time for each of us to ask ourselves a question: Which is more important for me — the right of a child to live or my right to keep and bear arms given to me by the sacred Second Amendment to our Constitution?
I've been hearing variations of this question for as long as I've been reporting on Second Amendment issues, but its very premise is nonsensical. The Second Amendment has existed since 1791, and there has never been any widespread effort to amend or repeal it. Does that mean that every generation that's come before us, including the one that enshrined the right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution, believed those rights were more important than the lives of children?
The Second Amendment largely exists to defend lives, and most of us understand that even if the Second Amendment were repealed tomorrow, evil individuals would still be targeting innocent victims.
If your answer is the first choice, I plead with you to join me in contacting every one of our elected officials at every level and demand that they take action to stop the slaughter. At the very least, assault weapon ban, background checks to own a gun and red flag laws.
... And to those who read this far in spite of my suggestion that you not do so if it means giving up a part of your sacred Second Amendment rights, the time is now to amend those rights, at least to a point where my kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids will have the right to live. Damn the Second Amendment as it is currently written. We know what happens when we do nothing — people die. Kids die. The only unknown is the number of days before the next mass shooting at a school. It could be one near you. Act now!
Minnesota already has a "red flag" law on the books, as well as a background check requirement on all firearm transfers. Clearly, those laws won't stop these kinds of attacks.
What about a ban on "assault weapons"? Well, the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history was committed by someone using handguns, not a rifle, and the deadliest attack on a school involved dynamite, not firearms. Let's also not forget that there were multiple school shootings, including Columbine, during the ten-year period when so-called assualt weapons were banned under federal law.
Banning commonly owned semi-automatic rifles does violate the Second Amendment, in my opinion, but it also wouldn't stop someone from carrying out a heinous and cowardly attack on children.
Even if the Second Amendment were repealed tomorrow and replaced with new language that prohibited keeping and bearing arms, there are roughly 400 million privately owned firearms in the United States. What happens to them? Do we need to repeal the Fourth Amendment to allow police to enter our homes and search for any guns that might be inside? Would the author of this letter be okay with police routinely stopping them on the street and and searching their car or patting them down for weapons if it was done in the name of protecting kids?
We can (and do) care about our kids and our civil rights, and its asinine to claim we have to decide between one or the other. It's also incredibly simplistic to believe that school shootings specifically or violent crime in general would disappear if we scrapped the Second Amendment.
Every time I hear someone make that argument I think about the prediction from evangelist Billy Sunday at the dawn of Prohibition, when he declared, "the reign of tears is over", that "slums will soon be only a memory," and that "we will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs."
The false promise of safety at the expense of our individual liberty is seductive. It's comforting to think that if we only pass this one law or repeal this civil right that the "reign of tears" will be over. History shows us, though, that it's just not true.
Drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine are prohibited, and there were more than 70,000 overdose deaths last year. Sales of alcoholic beverages were generally prohibited between 1920 and 1933, and there were over ten thousand deaths just from drinking denatured alcohol, with an untold number of other alcohol-related deaths during that time period. Washington, D.C. banned handguns in 1976, and fifteen years later its homicide rate had soared from about 26 per 100,000 people to 80.6 per 100,000.
It would be an utter disaster to repeat D.C.'s mistake, and it would be even worse if we got rid of the Second Amendment altogether, even if it was done "for the kids." The truth is that we'll always have sick individuals intent on doing harm to as many people as possible, which is just one reason why so many Americans who care about children also want to be able to defend them, if necessary.
