The Second Amendment must go: We ban lawn darts. It’s time to ban guns [View all]

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http://www.salon.com/2015/12/04/the_second_amendment_must_go_we_ban_lawn_darts_its_time_to_ban_guns/

We are one nation, forever fucked by the NRA and an outdated and dangerous read of the Constitution. Let's fix it



Our youngest son just transitioned from crib to bed. Since we don’t plan to have any more children, we decided to sell the crib, a hand-me-down from his older brother. It’s a nice, well-made crib, made from real wood and bought from a reliable company. We could easily resell it for a handsome price, but we found out a few weeks ago that we can’t. It’s a drop side crib, and unbeknownst to us the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) banned the manufacture, sale, and resale of drop-sides in 2010, even though individuals can unadvisedly still use them. Drop-sides were responsible for more than 30 infant and toddler deaths in the decade prior to their ban, along with thousands of injuries. We hadn’t realized that our kid had been sleeping and playing in a death trap.

A few accidental deaths are often enough to ban certain items, or at the very least recall them, and often without much fanfare. It’s strange that we don’t have the same reaction to guns. Guns have killed many more infants and toddlers than drop-side cribs, not to mention older children, adolescents, and adults. Guns have killed many more than a host of other objects not originally designed to kill. Remember lawn darts? The CPSC banned the sale of the metal-tipped ones after three deaths and numerous serious injuries.

Yet when it comes to guns, we collectively do nothing, except spout off some strained political rhetoric every now and then, that is, after the most recent mass shooting. [Add in prayer here.] Or we dig in and cite our constitutional right to bear arms, which apparently trumps death, even the death of children. There’s a lot of room for debate regarding the meaning of the second amendment. I doubt very much that our “founding fathers” envisioned that right in its current form, but even if they did, it really shouldn’t matter. The framers of the constitution weren’t gods, meaning that their words aren’t—and shouldn’t be—sacrosanct.

We know this intuitively, since we’ve had to add numerous amendments to make up for their failures, lack, or just plain ignorance. But if we can add, we can also take away, by interpreting the Second Amendment differently or passing a new amendment that would effectively repeal it. We should never do so lightly, of course—taking away rights can be, and often is, a risky enterprise. But the purpose of a right should be individual and collective flourishing. A right, in other words, has as its goal the individual and common good, even if we don’t like to use such weighty moral terminology nowadays.

It’s not clear to me that gun ownership accomplishes that purpose. It seems more the case that it works against the good of all, in the havoc and murder it wreaks but also in the fear that in promotes. At the very least, we should have a discussion about the relationship of guns to the common good, instead of appealing like a fundamentalist to “rights” every time something happens that questions their value.

Guns don’t kill people, people do, someone will say. But people use guns to kill people, and it makes it much easier to do so, including on a mass scale. The idea that guns aren’t to blame but the actions of people is misguided and unthinking, to say the least. Specifically, it ignores what guns are for. A crib or, perhaps, a car, may kill under certain circumstances, but that’s not what a crib or a car is for. When death does result from their use, we assume that they have, in some way, been misused. At the very least, they have failed to fulfill their intended purpose, intentionally or not. Not so with a gun. The whole point of a gun is to injure or kill. Guns can certainly be used in other ways and for other reasons, such as sport, but these are secondary to its primary function. When a gun is used to injure or kill, it’s being used as intended. It’s the gun that’s at issue, because of the type of object that it is.

But the problem is irresponsible gun owners or criminals, not the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens who choose to own and use guns responsibly, people say. A fair point at one level, but most everyone’s responsible and law-abiding until they’re not. People in committed relationships usually go into them with fidelity in mind, yet infidelity is common and, often, unexpected. It’s similar with guns and gun owners. No “responsible” gun owner ever thinks he’ll ever misuse his gun—until he does something stupid, gets angry in the wrong place at the wrong time, leaves it unattended with children around, or simply snaps. Perhaps that doesn’t happen most of the time, but it happens frequently enough to raise questions, even though we usually don’t.

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Much more and worth the read at above link.