Nine more people have been murdered. This time in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. If you’ve been paying attention to the news for the last couple of decades in the United States, it should come as no surprise that someone used a gun to murder these people.You should also be unsurprised in the upcoming weeks when we decide to do absolutely nothing about our country’s gun problem.Actually, all of this should surprise the living shit out of you. Every time something like this happens I’m amazed by how little we as a country do to prevent it from happening again.Why is that?In less than two weeks we’re going to celebrate our country’s independence and we’re going to pat ourselves on the back and talk about what a great country we are, and how we’re exceptional, and we’re the great beacon light of hope, and we’ll throw around words like freedom and liberty.But we’ll do nothing to prevent guns from killing another 33,000 of our citizens (half of them from murder), as they did last year.The other night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart correctly pointed out that we started two wars because some foreigners came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. But when we kill eleven times that many of ourselves—year after year—we do nothing. We throw up our hands and deflect blame.It must be mental illness. It must be poverty. It must desperation. The victim’s to blame because they didn’t arm themselves. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.Bullshit.Guns kill people. No, not by themselves. They need a human to help kill. But most humans need a gun to help kill, as well. If someone wants to try to kill me and I get to choose whether they try to do so with a gun or with a knife, I’m choosing a knife every single time.So if we’re the greatest country on earth, and we have such an obvious problem, why don’t we solve the problem? If we’re the greatest country on earth, then why are we the only advanced country where so many people are killed by guns? If we’re the greatest country on earth why are we so quick to “bring the fight to the terrorists,” but ignore the terror that occurs every single day on our streets and in our schools, churches and homes?
Why do we let a document written by people in a country that was racially, sexually, ethnically, and culturally different from ours (America in 1789 versus America in 2015) tie our hands in addressing the problems we face today?A bunch of white men wrote a sentence in the Constitution more than 200 years ago, and some of us hide behind that sentence to avoid confronting the real problems we’re facing today. The ancestors of the people gunned down in the church in Charleston had no say in whether the Second Amendment should be ratified or not.So what should we do? A good first step would be to repeal the Second Amendment. This doesn’t mean abolishing guns. It doesn’t mean confiscating guns.It would mean that if you wanted to own a gun you’d have to do a lot more than just pass a background check. It would mean if you wanted to own a gun you’d be responsible for whatever mayhem that gun may cause. It would mean even lower rates of gun ownership—which has been declining for decades—because it’d become such a pain in the ass to obtain the privilege (the privilege, not the right) to own a gun.“But what about government tyranny?”Newsflash: It’s not the Second Amendment that protects us from government tyranny. It’s the rest of the Constitution, and the general population’s acceptance of a representative democracy.“Don’t I have a right to protect me and my home?”Of course you do. And if you want to do that with a gun, and you can pass these new stricter standards, then feel free. But fewer guns overall will mean fewer guns in the hands of crazy people who want to hurt you. So no matter how great your paranoia, the chances will remain low that you’ll have to use your gun to protect yourself.In the 227 years since the U.S. Constitution was ratified, 188 nations have written Constitutions of their own, most of them modeled after ours. And of those 188 nations, 97% protect freedom of religion, speech, and the press. 97% protect private property. 95% protect against unreasonable searches. 94% protect the right to assembly.How many protect the right to bear arms? 1%.Exceptional, indeed.PREVIOUS POST: My Dad Helped Me Become MeIF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: Dear Guns,+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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