Op-Ed Pages #2: Guns…
[Note from Steve: As some faithful readers of this blog already know, it originally contained op-ed articles about current issues and events as well as book and movie reviews, author interviews, and articles about reading, writing, and the publishing business (all written in op-ed style). I stopped posting the first type because they often represented too long an investment in time to find the relevant background material and fact-check as much as possible. That said, I believe it’s now time to express my opinions again, so I’ll occasionally post such articles in the future. They’ll all start with the phrase “Op-Ed Pages” so you can skip over them if you like (I prefer that you comment, though, even if you disagree). Here’s another post in this new (and old) category….]
I cringed when I saw protesters in Michigan’s capitol rotunda carrying automatic weapons. I immediately asked myself, Who do they want to kill? The governor? (Just a few days ago, a man was arrested for threatening the life of Michigan’s governor.) The legislators? Or are they just macho crazy fanatics looking for media attention? Maybe they should turn to more useful activities like helping those Michigan people threatened by the floods?
Here’s the problem with guns: In a protest or any argument (stand-your-ground laws come to mind), such weapons can lead to a slaughter. And, if both sides are armed—and FYI, Michigan crazies, the other side can bring weapons too—the slaughter will affect both sides. That’s a rather barbaric outcome for the 21st century but not unusual elsewhere (Afghanistan, India, Yemen, etc.). Maybe that’s what the knuckle-dragging knuckleheads in Michigan want? They might as well be brainless, bloodthirsty zombies. Freedom fighters they’re not!
I didn’t have answers for those questions in the first paragraph, but that didn’t matter. The whole episode just reaffirmed my belief that ordinary citizens must be protected from all fanatics, but especially NRA fanatics. We need reasonable gun control! While Donald J. Trump is the dangerous fanatic holding the nuclear codes, is he more dangerous that these protesters? Maybe. He enables them by defending them (“There are good people on both sides”). I refuse to visit states with stand-your-ground laws. While the knuckle-dragging gun fanatics aren’t likely to shoot me because they don’t like one of my books—no danger there, because most of these skinheads can’t read well and just watch Fox News while belching on the couch, both activities just like their idol’s—I still don’t want to run the risk that someone shoots me over a parking space.
Second Amendment “experts” who believe the Founding Fathers gave them the right to bear arms are ignoramuses who don’t know history. Not only do they don’t read books, they’ve never read, let alone studied, the Constitution. I guarantee most immigrants studying to get their citizenship papers know more about that famous document than most Americans, especially the gun nuts. The use of the phrases “bear arms” and “militias” in the eighteenth century was simply a recognition by the Founding Fathers that, without militias to fight the King’s Redcoats, the American Revolution would never have occurred.
A database at BYU shows exactly that. Almost every document is evidence for restricted gun use. Of course, many people ignore history. Antonin Scalia didn’t, though. He cherry-picked those documents in that database to find only those documents that make some reference to personal gun ownership. In doing so, he out-Trumped our current president: lying by omission is still lying! A cleverer way of doing it…maybe. And not that he was the first conservative judge to do so. Most SCOTUS conservative judges got to where they are by lying, mostly by ignoring precedent, i.e. lies by omission.
Scalia’s peccadillos show that my claim is correct: the Second Amendment refers only to the right of militias to bear arms. FYI: We still have that, and exactly as the Founding Fathers wanted. We just call the militias the National Guards now, primarily because militias are now groups of paranoid neo-Nazis who think liberals are taking over the world (and don’t mention it’s them that want to do that). They’re Trump supporters too, because he enables them. That should be evidence enough for any idiot, Scalia included, that doesn’t think language changes. (Again, Scalia was selective, and not just gun control, when adhering to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.) ((If you’re thinking I’m out to destroy Scalia’s rep, you’re right. I don’t respect the dead when they’ve done so much damage to the country. In fact, I’ll spit on Trump’s grave if I live long enough.)
There is no right to bear arms in public, period. We can twiddle that a bit with local laws (I’d allow hunting and target practice but ban all private ownership of automatic weapons—you don’t need a military-style weapon for sporting purposes!), and make exceptions for law enforcement (probably not needed if guns become illegal). In particular, those gorilla-Nazis in that Michigan rotunda don’t have that right, especially considering that COVID-19 is my enemy as well as theirs (I’m smart enough to know guns won’t help fight against the virus). The Michigan governor isn’t the enemy. When protesting knuckleheads do those sort of things, they’re infringing on the freedoms of other responsible citizens. They don’t have the freedom to infect others, by force of guns or otherwise. Anyone who wants to do that is guilty of attempted murder (and maybe kills people anyway as they become infected!). They should all be in jail. But that would be unfair to the prisoners in the jails because the knuckleheads would take their disease, both mental and physical, into jail with them. So maybe they should just be put in straitjackets and locked up in solitary.
More civilized countries have strict gun controls. In Britain, the controls are so strict that most people don’t bother. (I suppose the older male royals have guns to hunt game on their family preserves, though.) The police don’t usually carry guns. When they do a raid and suspect the perps have guns, the SCO19 (SWAT in the US) is used to settle that issue by going in early and eliminating the gun threat. On the other hand, European tourists often worry about visiting southern states, because that’s where there’s a high density of gun nuts, but it looks like they should start worrying about Michigan too!
There is no gun that will kill the coronavirus; only responsible social behavior does that. Those guns protestors carried in that Michigan rotunda were probably teeming with virus particles. I don’t suppose those morons wiped their guns off with disinfectant, though. Maybe they should follow their wonderful leader’s advice and drink it? Then they wouldn’t need any guns ever again! And if they hadn’t yet bred, the human race would be that much smarter—Darwinian evolution at its finest!
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Comments are always welcome.
Short fiction anthologies and collections. While I give away most of my short fiction now (see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), some of it can be found in anthologies and collections. Detective Castilblanco’s first homicide case can be found in the anthology World Enough and Crime (Donna and Alex Carrick, eds.), and a sci-fi crime story is included in Howling at the Moon (#WolfPackAuthors, eds.—the crimes take place on the moon!). Other Chen & Castilblanco stories can be found in the collection Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, and more speculative fiction in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape (Vols. 2 and 3 are give-aways—see the list). All these stories are a good way to try my fiction without investing time in a novel. Of course, I’d be a happy camper if you read both (all my novels are reasonably priced).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
