A
Liberal Dose
June
9, 2022
Troy
D. Smith
“Why
Is It So Hard to Pass Gun Laws?”
“Another school
shooting. It has become like clockwork.”
That’s the first line
I wrote for this column, almost three weeks ago… but every time I was ready to
send it in to the editor, there was another shooting, and I delayed this topic
in order to talk about the new one, too. And there have been so many new ones,
so close upon one another, I finally realized that if I wait until I am caught
up with the number of mass shootings, I’ll never actually get this piece
written. And, apparently, we came very close to one at the Cookeville Wal-mart
last week.
Clockwork.
It is easy to become
desensitized to it. Shootings at the grocery store, at a church, at a military
base, at a club, at a concert. But I will never be desensitized to the shooting
of little children. Hence the tone of this article.
I am a gun owner. I
like guns. I have trained with guns (though it’s been a while). As a U.S.
citizen I have the right to have handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles in my
home, to protect my property from varmints and my home from aggressive
invaders. While the wording of the Second Amendment is frustratingly vague, the
Supreme Court has interpreted it to be a protection of what I just described.
That has not always been the case- some “wild west” towns banned firearms in
the city limits.
But “the right to
bear arms” has never meant “all arms that exist.” It has, can and should be
regulated. I mean, hand grenades and rocket launchers are arms. Some people
might think it would look cool to walk around with live grenades or rocket
launchers, but you can’t, because it’s a public health risk. The same
principles apply to military-style semi-automatic weapons- their only practical
use is KILLING LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE QUICKLY. It is the same reason AUTOMATIC
weapons were banned decades ago (and remain banned): gangsters in the 1930s
were killing each other, and bystanders, by the carload. But even Al Capone
didn’t target little children (unless they got in the way).
This is just common
sense, and most Americans agree with me. But gun manufacturers don’t agree with
me, because they want to sell lots of guns, to make lots of profit. Know who
else will not publicly agree with me? The Republican politicians the gun
industry owns. Politicians are afraid they will lose power, or their jobs, and
the gun industry is afraid of losing money. And to heck with our children.
Someone else who
doesn’t agree with me: a minority of citizens whom those gun-industry-owned
politicians have stirred into a paranoid frenzy by saying that the mean
liberals are coming to take ALL your guns, and that your home is in danger of
being invaded by caravans of immigrants. Side note: gun sales always go way up
when such paranoia gets a fresh stir.
I’ve had friends reason
that the second amendment exists so citizens can overthrow tyranny, therefore
private citizens need to have the same weapons the army does, in order to fight
against them. Some of those folks supported the January 6th
insurrection, because they didn’t like how the vote went. Counting all the
votes is not tyranny; creating laws designed to prevent people you don’t like
from voting, because you wouldn’t like the outcome, THAT’S tyranny. My point
is, some people think the Second Amendment trumps all the OTHER amendments, or
want to ignore them completely. Heck, they even ignore the last part of the
Second, where it talks about a “well regulated” militia. Politicians want to
keep the votes of their base, and therefore bend over backwards for the gun
industry, who keep the base agitated and donate to those politicians.
But know where you
can’t legally carry a gun? Government buildings. Especially capitol buildings, where the politicians are.
Wake up.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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