Seeking Answers, As Usual

THE REFLEXIVE AMERICAN RESPONSE to mass murder is prayer and thoughts. They both seem to have marginal efficacy. Pronouncements of outrage and round table discussions don't seem to help mitigate the national slaughter either. There is speculation that withholding publicity from mass murderers might serve to alleviate the madness. Nice try. One hundred Americans are shot to death every day, sixty one of which are self inflicted. Over the past fifty years, more Americans have shot themselves and each other than have been killed in all the wars the United states has ever fought. People who kill themselves with guns have a ninety five percent success rate. Those who use pills and razor blades succeed at a rate of three percent. To most Americans, the very thought of removing firearms from private hands is too abhorrent to even contemplate, because the second amendment is sacrosanct, and without privately owned weapons America would no longer be free or well defended, the military evidently being inadequate to the task. There are more privately owned firearms than Americans in America. James Madison was skeptical about the bill of rights. He thought, or so he said, that it would likely be ignored. When the second amendment was adopted, firearms were useless for personal defense and their ownership was strongly regulated. Men of military age required to own and maintain a musket, but were prohibited from using it except on the field of battle. The new nation rejected the idea of a professionally, permanently standing military; a well regulated militia was considered necessary to the security of a free state. The United States started getting serious about gun control when repeating revolvers and long guns were invented, and more serious still when the infamous tommy gun appeared at the end of World War One. Most late nineteenth century gun registration was intended to keep guns away from freed blacks and working class whites, who must not be allowed to have political power of any sort. The National Rifle Association, like the Ku Klux Klan, was formed to help achieve this end, and the NRA was intended to encourage gun safety and good marksmanship, which had been sorely lacking among union soldiers during the war. This remained the NRA's purpose until 1977, when an extremist faction seized control of the organization, and politicized it, a disease from which it has never recovered. The wild west was never very wild; gun fatalities were relatively rare on the American frontier; nobody but the law was allowed to carry guns in frontier towns. Only lately has the U.S. become the wild west, since people, not guns, kill people. When England and Australia gave up guns, their rate of gun deaths declined precipitously; in America, to do so would be unthinkable. The founders never intended the second amendment to encourage Americans to arm themselves to the hilt for self defense. Those who defend an originalist interpretation of the constitution reinvent the document when it suits their agenda. An originalist constitution would have us all keeping muskets in our homes, for militia duty only. Thus proceeds our great American massacre, and no matter how devoutly we pray for deliverance or blame it on abortion or too few guns in too few hands or blame it on the expulsion of god from public schools, God himself seems content to leave well enough alone.