2nd: 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.
According
to the Gospel of Matthew the Roman satrap Herod the Great, having heard through
the magi that a great king was to be born in Bethlehem, and willing to brook no
competitor, ordered the killing of all male babies in that village. The feast of the “Slaughter of the Innocents”
falls in most western churches just after Christmas, and it has been the
subject of famous works of art, including the well-known paintings of Breughel
and Poussin, among many others.
There is no other evidence of the historicity of the supposed event,
allowing us at least the hope that it might be emblematic rather than
literal. But its horror, alas, is
not inconsistent with actual known realities concerning the exercise of power
in the ancient Near East. The
final verse of the beautiful psalm Super
flumina ("By the Waters of Babylon") expresses the fervent wish of the psalmist that the infants
of his oppressors have their heads crushed against a stone wall.
Herod's men bearing arms: Breughel
Of
Herod it can at least be said that he had an identifiable rational motive. He was not a vaguely “disturbed youth”
or “troubled loner”. The arena of
most moral analysis, surely, is the relationship between means and ends. Herod used unspeakable means
in pursuit of an ignoble end, but there was some connection between means and ends.
We
have a very big problem with guns in the United States. I will spare you the bit about growing
up out in the country, of sensing for as long as I can remember that guns were
ordinary machines, though perhaps demanding even more respect than such other
dangerous machines as automobiles, chainsaws, mowers, or engine block hoists,
or of assuming that shooting birds and small animals was a universally
practiced mode of improving a family’s protein intake. That’s all true, but also quite
irrelevant to the pre-Christmas slaughter of innocents in Newtown CT.
The
gun problem in America is complex and of long duration. It is probably not susceptible to
solution, but that does not mean it is beyond amelioration. One index of intelligent organization,
surely, is a reasonable correlation between theory and practice. Take a look at the second amendment to
the Constitution. The second thing
to notice about it is that there is not a person alive who can parse its
grammar. If the absolute phrase with
which it begins is a justification for “the right of the people to keep and
bear arms,” the amendment is at the very least obsolete. The national defense has not depended
upon private arms for most of the history of the republic. But the first thing to notice about the second amendment is
that it is an amendment.
Our
Constitution makes no claim to perfection or immutability. How could it?
Our adulation of the Founders sometimes does not stop short of
idolatry. Would such men be so
stupid as to fail to anticipate the probable need for future changes, or to
fail to provide a vehicle for their accomplishment? Of course not.
Almost immediately people saw the need to make ten such changes, and
made them by amendment. We call them the Bill of Rights. Yet everything legal was not in fact
always right. For example the Constitution clearly
recognized the legitimacy of chattel slavery. Chucking out the constitutional “right” to enslave human
beings turned out to be a rather controversial and strenuous business, but the
nation eventually got around to it by amendment. What amend means is “to change or modify for the better;” and it can be
accomplished by subtraction no less than by addition.
Though
I lack specific social science data I will venture the guess that alcohol abuse
has racked up an even sorrier record of disaster in our American domestic
society than has gun abuse. It
certainly has in my personal, anecdotal experience. I know of no gun accident or atrocity among my own family, my
neighbors, or my college classmates.
I could point to a dozen alcohol disasters among that same group. Thus I can sympathize with and
understand the motives of those who, after decades of struggle, succeeded in
prohibiting alcoholic beverages in 1920 by means of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Of
course the Eighteenth Amendment itself soon turned out to be a disaster. When enough people came to that
conclusion, they repealed it in 1933 by means of the Twenty-First
Amendment. It took only a brief
time for the well-intentioned prohibition of alcohol to reveal its unfortunate
unintended consequences. It has
taken the Second Amendment a couple of centuries longer, but they now seem to
me sufficiently clear. What was
once intended to extend our liberties has become, in Paul’s terms, “a cloak of
maliciousness”.
I
propose the repeal of the Second Amendment. Let firearms and their possession go unmentioned in the
Constitution. Let firearms be like
trains, planes, automobiles, chainsaws, commercial explosives, electrical
wiring, potable alcohol, and thousands of other items of our material culture—stuff that may be very useful, but still
potentially dangerous to a degree that invites periodic review and regulation
by the duly constituted authorities charged with preserving the general
welfare.
