Here’s some common sense for you. I want gun ownership to be as boring and annoying as car ownership. I want you to go to some Department of Weapons and sit for hours. I want folks who own guns to prove their skill, their mental and physical health, and to be licensed and reviewed over the years just as happens with our driver’s licenses. You earn the right to own and drive a vehicle; earn the right to own and use a gun…. Gun ownership isn’t some inalienable right granted by God. Remember, the Constitution was written by men coming out of a long and bloody war near the end of the 18th century. It was written for their time. It also included the “right” to own a human being. Things change…. When you have a greater ability to take a human life, you have a greater responsibility to prove your fitness to wield the tools that may create that end. And that’s how the fuck you well-regulate a goddamn American militia.
There’s no secret to protecting Americans from gun violence. While our history, culture, and legal landscape may prevent the
Those who loudly demand their “guns rights” be respected ignore the first 13 words of the 2nd Amendment even as they cling to the last 14 as if their lives depended on it. This sort of cherry-picking is not only intellectually and morally dishonest, it’s created an environment in which Americans have acquiesced to repeated mass slaughters of innocent civilians, including children. You don’t get to ignore the part you find inconvenient even as you cling to the part that serves your agenda.
If you believe the 2nd Amendment provides you the unquestioned, divinely-sanctioned right to carry any type of firepower you choose wherever, whenever, and for whatever reason you use as justification, you’re not a patriot. You’re a zealot who’s chosen to twist the most abused and willfully manipulated 27 words in the English language to your advantage. What well-regulated militia do you belong to? If you can’t answer that question, you have no business claiming your interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is the One, True, and ONLY version.
All I really want for Christmas is a world in which the senseless slaughter of innocent men, women, and children isn’t view as merely the cost of freedom. I’m tired of wondering where the next mass shooting will take place even as I know that it WILL happen…and soon.
Common sense gun control isn’t about taking guns; it’s about saving lives. It’s about recognizing that we deserve better than having to live in a world in which random, senseless murder is commonplace and in which shedding the blood of innocents is dismissed as merely watering the tree of liberty. The blood of innocents shouldn’t be seen as the price of freedom. That belief only proves there are monsters among us who don’t care that Americans are burying their loved ones so that the NRA and the gun industry can maintain profitability.
We should be better than this…shouldn’t we??
