Congenial speak #61

America's Fight for Life (again)

Marching for rights, marching to vote. Marching for life, marching for the right to life, for jobs and equal pay. March 24,2018, was for the lives of the future of America, if not the world. It was focused, not piggy-backed. No other issue blurred the non-gun-violence agenda. No addenda. Eloquently and dramatically, tactically planted elements necessary to move people through witness, through television, through social media. MLK, RFK, Abbie Hoffman, Ghandi, Lennon, JESUS, all would be proud. Hoffman would be proud of the way they used the media, of their relentless insistence of congress's full capitulation with their simple, peaceful demand or they would vote them out of office. Emma González's speech of silence spoke to me the loudest, capturing, depicting, recording, what they went through on Valentine's Day. She brilliantly recreated the fear, the loss, what so many named remembrances and those left blank—for us to fill in—would never do again.

Yes, the world—or a good part of America—was watching them. The NRA was watching, feeling gentle tugs on their high horse, the giant they turned into sometime in the 1970s, when it became less and less about gun safety and more about profiting at the nation's expense in every sense of the word. Scant retailers have stopped bowing down to them. Laws were passed in Florida that have the potential to impact their business. And, as the days to November dwindle down, senators like Mr. Rubio will have to decide what is more important, keeping their job which involves getting money from the NRA, or maybe having to do with a few hundred thousand less and actually listening to their constituents. It's a simple proposition, one that lawmakers are doing their best to obfuscate; vote for legislation banning military-style weapons, for universal background checks, or be voted out of office.

Following a comprehensive gun control act in 1968, the regulation of sale, availability, and requirements to own and carry a gun have been loosened and tightened. It depends on the political landscape, who's in office, the need for lobbies and special interests. Since the mid-'70s the NRA has run the show, quite literally, with at least 5, 000 gun shows having taken place in the U.S. annually in recent years. The gun show is the notorious loophole through which a background check is avoided, putting massive quantities of hand guns and assault weapons into circulation with no regard for in whose hands they ultimately rest. The gun show is the second amendment's biggest perversion. In reality, in a time when a common people were relied upon to police a state, a colony, a settlement, in a time when the common citizen comprised the militia, the second amendment was read in full. At gun shows private dealers sell to private citizens who have no intention—at that show—of using their gun in any militia. “For a well-regulated militia.....” What if that clause had come elsewhere in the text, if it had stood as an independent clause, less possible to discount. All readers, at least since the old west, when it was imperative to carry a gun, see is the gist, what they want out of the constitution, “The right to bear arms. A 2010 Supreme Court case—McDonald v. City of Chicago—ruled in favor of the second amendment, effectively condoning inter-city violence. It decided that a private citizen had a right to keep a bear a firearm under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The clause requires a state to provide equal protection under the law for all citizens. What are the militia, the police, the executive branch of government?

The impossible dream

The second amendment, the “god-given” right to own a gun, presumably for protection, is not prohibition. That ten year “noble experiment” was the result of decades of work, driving religious revivals and temperance lectures, much to do by women, was a good idea at one time, perhaps. On all accounts, socially, economically, physically, prohibition was devastating and played a role in setting the stage for the Great Depression. In 13 years, 10 months and 19 days the eighteenth amendment was repealed by the twenty-first. Not unlike the alcohol, guns are in peoples' blood, not mine, but evidently an overwhelming majority of those from either side of the aisle, although in recent months that is on the tip of waning. Former SCOTUS justice John Paul Stevens proposes a repeal of the second amendment. As I, and many people I know, would sign to ratify such an amendment, I also think pushing for its total repeal would damage the nascent progress the March for Lives has started. Repeal is something, to me, delicious, to consider. But I also know our heritage, how long Americans have taken it for granted, squawked at the slightest infringement on their right to own a gun. The reprogramming of the human mind to concede to not being able to buy an assault weapon, to expect a background check to buy a gun as routinely as those for employment, is achievable. However the thought of never being able to posses a firearm of any kind I think is a pipe dream. It is an idea most Americans can't wrap their trigger conditioned fingers around. The result would be like we saw in 1933. If the twenty-eighth amendment repealed the second amendment, the twenty-ninth would repeal it. And if someday the constitution were amended, to carry no such clause, dependent or independent, misconstrued or thoroughly read, I'm guessing many of its opponents, at least on the illicit end of the gun trade, won't be around to see it.