Constitution of the United States: Amendment II; A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed...
Last Thursday, 24 June 2010, our Constitution and specifically the 2nd Amendment, one of its important first 10 amendments (collectively referred to as the Bill of Rights), which has been under fire very much as of late by this administration was vindicated. The result being that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America was upheld, wisely I might add, by a majority decision (a slim 5 to 4) of our Supreme Court yesterday.
In writing the majority decision Justice Antonin Scalia properly iterates the role of the Supreme Court:
"Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem," Scalia wrote. "That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."
Justice Scalia, shows great wisdom and clarity in that excerpt from the decision. Take into account that when our founding fathers crafted the 2nd Amendment, they had two over-arching issues in mind:
1. They wanted to ensure the nation had an armed militia that it could call upon in times of need or national duress. (Note: our Army was very small and as a fledgling nation we were definitely prey for any superpower of the era.)
Case in point, the early 20th Century, Pancho Villa, a Mexican outlaw with a large criminal entourage, was making incursions into two of the border states, New Mexico and Texas. What happened? Well, what happened was that armed American civilians fought off the criminal invaders and eventually the U.S. Army was called in to deal with it. Flash forward to the early 21st Century, we have criminal Mexican and other cartels bringing illegal traffic in the form of humans and drugs across our borders. We again have armed American civilians there, in the form of the group called the "Minutemen" to try to sound the alarm and stem the flow into their home states... Do you think that the U.S. military will come to their aid? Fat chance as the current administration's policy of border security is one of rhetoric and apathy rather than one of strength and security.
2. They also wanted to ensure that the people would not be helpless in the face of the rise of a tyrannical government as they had been when they sought Independece for us from Great Britain and started what kicked off this 230+ year experiment in Freedom and Justice For All...
Now while I also would argue that while the degrees of such needs, and the focus of those demands (and any future), have changed or (yet to be defined), the core exigent demands themselves remain.
That said, I truly believe that we can meet them while retaining some level of diligence and control. Reducing accidents and fatalities from gun use is not so much a matter of continuing to legislate tighter and tighter controls over the inplements, we have gun control now, but rather to address the behaviors that cause the use of the instruments to cause the incidents and enforcement of the existing legislation and controls. The old adage that GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE is key to this premise.
Mandatory training with certified weapons instructors during the waiting period should be incorporated into legislation, again, influencing the philosophy and the mental process of people and how and when they should use a firearm. Of course this is all academic, since the predominance of shootings and crimes with firearms are not done by law abiding individuals but those by and with criminal intentions. These indivduals don't buy their weapons via lawful means either- they steal, bribe and black market these automatice weapons of, what liberals would have us believe, mass destruction...
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