Is our Second Amendment being infringed?

It's been a little too quiet on that front.

Fortunately we have not heard of any mass shooting which have made the news lately, and that’s always good. It doesn’t mean there are none going on - just give Chicago, Baltimore, or any other large Democrat-run city a week and you’ll run across one - but since school is just about finished for the summer we may be able to breathe a little easier. Or maybe not because school shootings often happen just before summer vacation. Moreover, the various workplace-related or “gun-free zone” incidents we tend to have know no season.

So when we inevitably have those multi-victim murders, the bodies aren’t even cold before a segment of our society screams about how ineffective “thoughts and prayers” are and demands “common sense gun control,” which to them is disarming the populace. (This is done at the same time the media tries to dig up any shred of evidence the perpetrator is a Trump-supporting male white supremacist. When there’s none, the story is buried - witness the shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, which was committed by a person suffering from gender dysphoria who was born female.)

And every year in our local legislatures as well as Congress, we get bill after bill trying to create a backdoor registry or ban those “scary-looking” accessories, or creating the world-famous “gun buyback” or some other combination of these restrictions. So let me tell you where I stand with an illustration.

If you don’t mind the dust and cobwebs of my garage, this is a photo of a three-pound sledge resting on my equally dusty old toolbox.

I bought this tool for a very specific purpose: it makes the task of pounding stakes and steel fence posts into the ground much easier than using a standard hammer. Being a little bit less than coordinated, it gives me a wide area to pound the stake and at three pounds it drives very well for a handheld tool. As you can tell by the cobwebs, it has been in its appointed spot for awhile, waiting for the time I need to use it again.

However, in the wrong hands and used with ultimate malice, this tool could do a lot of damage to a person. Certainly the force I use to strike a blow with this sledge on a metal fence post I have to drive about 12-18” into the ground would be enough to hurt or even kill someone. But no one has ever gone on a crusade to ban three-pound sledges even though they can be a lethal weapon.

If I bought a handgun and laid it on a table, loaded or not, as long as it’s undisturbed it’s not going to hurt anyone. Now I would have the common sense to a) not have it loaded when it’s in plain sight and b) not have it in plain sight for anyone to pick up in the first place. In theory, it would be easier to get to my hammer, but remember: no one is trying to ban hammers, or kitchen knives, or baseball bats, or clenched fists. People who purchase guns for self-defense understand that they are a tool, albeit a very destructive one that should be handled with the utmost in care. While I don’t believe the practice should have the force of law behind it, a prudent gun owner would enroll in a safety class. (In addition, a prudent school would use a course like the Eddie Eagle course created by the NRA that teaches kids what to do if they find a gun: stop, don’t touch, run away, and tell an adult.)

While we have millions of weapons in our collective possession, they’re not the problem. The REAL problem - and this is generational - is that we have lost respect for ourselves and respect for life in this country.

This is a nation where we debate over killing the unborn, instead of holding that life just as sanctified as any other. On the other side of the circle of life, more and more of the elderly are encouraged to take their own lives so that they’re less of a burden. Yes, it’s been limited to the terminally ill so far, but that is just a first step. We have cheapened life to the point where some find it disposable.

Moreover, disagreements that, in my time, were decided by fists are now decided by guns - not because guns weren’t available in my time, but because there’s now a segment of thug culture where such measures are encouraged. There were poor, rough neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s but they weren’t war zones.

There are many nations around the world where the only people who have guns are the government, and the worst of those are the places where hapless victims that offend someone in charge are “disappeared.” The other places are a barely restrained step or two away from that madness.

Thanks to the forethought of those who wrote the Constitution, though, we’re not to that state of play. But it seems like those who would like to get us to the situation I described in the paragraph above seldom directly speak in terms of repealing the Second Amendment (although a few do), according to a YouGov poll conducted in the wake of the Parkland shooting, “Just one in five would repeal the Second Amendment; but 46% would be willing to modify it to make it easier to regulate guns.”

Instead, they have hit upon a way to get us to that terrible place: convince enough of the populace to disarm themselves through various regulatory laws, then use that “popular support” to coerce the rest. If you don’t think it can be done, consider that fifty years ago people were free to smoke in public.

Here’s the way I look at it: you should be able to keep whatever guns you want for self-defense, but if you’re out looking for trouble with a gun and you find it, prepare to spend a long, long time in jail. None of this bargaining away the mandatory time for gun crimes - a law that was supposed to bring down gun crime but has been a miserable failure because it’s not enforced.

Trying to keep guns out the the hands of law-abiding folks is the wrong solution to a problem that stems from our youth being fed a message that other lives shouldn’t be respected. Unfortunately, that change is a generational one and in the meantime we still have to protect ourselves.