Here in West Virginia, guns are a common thing — many/most go hunting at least a couple of times a year and I grew up in Oklahoma where many/most people owned at least one gun. Not as much hunting in Oklahoma as around here, but it was commonplace to have a gun.
I just read an article that said the United States has 120.5 guns per 100 people, which is the highest total per capita number in the world. The article indicated that America’s gun culture stems in part from its colonial history, revolutionary roots and frontier expansion.
Obviously gun ownership has become a hot topic in the past few years — a lot of it due to mass shootings, and two, very opinionated, groups have formed. Those that are proponents for more gun control and those that are opposed.
Both groups, but especially those opposed to gun control cite the Second Amendment as an argument for their position. The text of the Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.“
The historical consensus is that, for most of American history, the amendment was understood to concern the use of guns in connection with militia service. The Founding Fathers were probably focused on keeping state militias from being disarmed.
The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals rights to own guns came to the forefront in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban. So the notion that the amendment protects people’s right to have guns for self-defense is a relatively recent reading of the Constitution.
The advances in military technology has changed the picture since the time the Second Amendment was written — back then, there was no difference between muskets used by soldiers and those kept in households.
Today, very few people are alarmed about the possibility that the federal government will turn totalitarian, but many people do not trust the government’s ability to protect them from crime and want a means of self-defense.
So — as with any argument, both sides make some valid points. It’s the extremists on both sides that only look at one side of the coin and make all the noise. Sometime around when Ronald Reagan was President, the National Rifle Association shifted from an organization concerned with gun safety to one protecting gun rights at all costs — their lobbyists making it more difficult for Congress to Independently make the right decisions.
My extensive research before I wrote this blog uncovered some interesting data….
• A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made the feel safer and 68% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer.
• The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof locks.
• The centers for Disease Control listed firearms as the #12 cause of all deaths between 1999 and 2015, They were also the #1 method of death by homicide and by suicide.
• Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders per 100,000 people compared to 9,146 gun homicides per 100,000 people in the US.
• Five women a day are killed by guns in America. A woman’s risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute.
The Second Amendment has recently become the most misunderstood provision of the Constitution. There are two schools of interpretation now — one that it’s about the right of individuals and the other that it’s about the right of a state to have a militia.
The issue isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon — we can only hope hat both sides can come to some kind of an agreement about what’s best for our country. The right to own a gun is one thing, but when the Bill of Rights was adopted, no one owned, or ever heard of, a MAG5100 — a 100-round magazine for an M-16. The concept of a mass slaughter of people carried out in a matter of minutes was incomprehensible.
— 30 —