Who owns the Second Amendment? Does it belong to the people who revere their right to own a gun? Or has it been coopted by the National Rifle Association and the politicians whose votes it buys?
Does it belong to the Americans who own guns? Or to the people who sell them?
Like a lot of people, I ‘ve been thinking about the Second Amendment lately. I’ve been thinking about the agony of people who lost family members to the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.
But — I’m not going to sit down and record my thoughts on guns and the constitution today. I not going to comment on the rights and civic responsibilities of actual gun owners.
That’s because I’ve already written that post — I wrote it way back in 2017, after 59 were shot and killed at a Las Vegas hotel.
You can reread that post if you have the heart to spend another minute of your life on this most discouraging of topics. It’s at “Whose Second Amendment Is It? The Gun Lobby’s? Or Gun Owners’?”
Like a lot of people in the media back in 2017, I was hoping the enormity of the Las Vegas massacre would mean that post would the last I’d have to write on the subject.
It wasn’t, of course. And I fear this post won’t be the last one either.
On a lighter note: Remember the early days of the pandemic shut-down? If not, here’s a refresher. I wrote it on Day Five of the Covid stay-at-home mandate. It’s a nice reminder of how obsessed we were (OK, I was) with keeping it clean: “We Are Pushing 80 — Do We Stay Out of Supermarkets? Sheltering at Home Day 5”
The taking of innocent human life should be unthinkable in our society. We should even abhor the execution of criminals. I wonder what has caused life to become so cheap, so devalued that these senseless massacres are thinkable.
So true. I also wonder why the death penalty is still acceptable in our society. Back when we humans lived in villages, there was often no other way to protect people from a violent criminal; the death penalty was maybe the only way to put away a dangerous actor. But now we have prisons. We don’t have to kill people in order to keep them from killing other people.
As for our epidemic of mass shootings, I’m wondering about the media’s tendency to rush in and magnify these tragedies with 24-hour outrage, horror and. let’s face it, rubbernecking. Maybe this over-top media coverage is part of the problem. Might this — often maudlin — reporting be giving impressionable minds the idea that the unthinkable is thinakable?
FYI — I’m a life-long journalist, so I’m not one to blame the media lightly.