None Of This Is About The Right To Bear Arms.…

Having gaso­line and open flames in the same vicin­i­ty is tempt­ing the laws of psy­chics; even­tu­al­ly, there will be an explo­sion. In a coun­try filled with racial and oth­er hatred and awash with weapons, the inevitable vio­lence was only to be expected.
The mass shoot­ings are too numer­ous to men­tion, let alone the shoot­ings in which one or two per­sons are vic­tim­ized. Those who want unen­cum­bered access to unlim­it­ed sup­plies of high-pow­ered weapons capa­ble of killing dozens of peo­ple in mere sec­onds argue that the sec­ond amend­ment to the con­sti­tu­tion guar­an­tees them the right to have those weapons.

The con­sti­tu­tion gives them to cov­er even though they care lit­tle about the oth­er rights guar­an­teed by the same constitution.
But their apoc­a­lyp­tic beliefs have noth­ing to do with rights and every­thing to do with their fears that Black & Brown peo­ple are get­ting too many rights. They need to keep the unfair advan­tages they have always enjoyed in American soci­ety. They believe guns guar­an­tee those advantages.

The idea that the sec­ond amend­ment guar­an­tees make it impos­si­ble to rein in gun own­er­ship in the United States is laugh­able. The sec­ond amend­ment was rat­i­fied in 1791; James Madison pro­posed the amend­ment to allow for the cre­ation of civil­ian forces that could coun­ter­act a tyran­ni­cal fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Bear in mind that at the time, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary war was not yet fought to free the new America from the tyran­ni­cal shack­les of Britain’s King George.
The American Revolutionary War, also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, secured the United States of America’s inde­pen­dence from Great Britain. Fighting began on April 19, 1775.
America had no stand­ing army, so, under­stand­ably, farm­ers, black­smiths, and every­one need­ed to have weapons to defend the new colonies.
It was not a stand­ing American army that defeat­ed the British; there was­n’t one. It was the every­man that did.
Neither Madison nor any oth­er framer could have fore­seen that there would be weapons in the hands of Americans 231 years lat­er that were killing oth­er Americans at the rate of dozens in a sin­gle burst.

Let us not kid our­selves into accept­ing the lie that because the sec­ond amend­ment to the con­sti­tu­tion guar­an­tees the right to bear arms, the gov­ern­ment can have no con­trol over the types of weapons mem­bers of the pub­lic has.
The United States has the most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary force in the his­to­ry of our plan­et; addi­tion­al­ly, there are rough­ly 18,000 police depart­ments across the nation.
Each state has its own nation­al guard; let us not pre­tend that we need all American cit­i­zens to have weapons to defend America. Those insist­ing that there can be no change to America’s gun laws intend to fight a dif­fer­ent war, not one in which they will be forced to defend an ene­my from with­out. They are stock­ing up on those weapons to kill their fel­low Americans.
A con­sti­tu­tion­al right is not an absolute right that guar­an­tees us to do as we please.

The first amend­ment guar­an­tees free­dom of speech, but before the con­sti­tu­tion­al guar­an­tee of free speech, there was the God-giv­en right to free speech. Yet the American gov­ern­ment had no prob­lem say­ing to American cit­i­zens, “you are not allowed to shout bomb on an air­plane; you are not allowed to shout fire in a crowd­ed theater”.
Realistically, the gov­ern­ment has no com­punc­tion about tak­ing away the rights of American cit­i­zens, but God for­bid that it would reg­u­late gun ownership.
None of this is about the right to bear arms as guar­an­teed by the sec­ond amend­ment to the con­sti­tu­tion; in the mean­time, young and old, black and white, and every­one in between is mere vic­tims in waiting…
Instead of reg­u­lat­ing guns and dis­al­low­ing 18-year-olds and every­one else from buy­ing dan­ger­ous weapons they hire more police. Police can­not stop the car­nage they show up after the fact, so there is that.

America’s worst school shootings

America’s worst school shootings 

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, a free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.