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Second Thoughts On An Amendment

The Wild, Wild Waste

February 27, 2015

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

                                    Preamble to the United States Constitution

Thoughtful, beautiful and inspiring words I must say. A mission statement for a new nation, unlike any before it. Many nice words about things anyone would have a hard time arguing with. I mean, who wouldn’t want Justice, Tranquility, common defence, general Welfare, Liberty and stuff like that? And as well thought out as this opening salvo appears at first blush, it seems like something is missing. I just can’t put my finger on it. Is it sex? Free tea? No slaves? Chocolate? Health care? Oh, I know what it is - GUNS!  

How did our Founding Fools - very nice white men, though illegal immigrants all - leave out the guns? What were they, French or something? If you’re alive today and not just a character in someone else’s dream, even if you’re an extraterrestrial monitoring our tiny planet, you would be excused for having the unavoidable sense that our great nation was founded on guns uber alles. All that Justice, Liberty, Tranquility stuff is all well and good I suppose, but come on - Guns baby. Guns - they’re what everyone’s talking about, what all the cool kids are wearing these days - or if not the guns, then possibly the bullets - and through no choice of their own. And the only thing standing between us and godless communists or godful terrorists? Guns.

Go grab a good generous gander at intermittent-Republican’t-front-runner Mike Huckabee’s new book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” with the emphasis apparently on and. He left out gasoline…too many syllables I guess. Golly gee, Reverend Mike doesn’t have time for gays, Greens, Gandhi, garlic, generosity, gravity and greenhouse gasses. Psycho Mike doesn’t see any difference between an AR-15 and a pencil when killing time comes around, believing "Every weapon is an assault weapon, a pencil is an assault weapon if you poke it in someone's eye." Yes he actually said that.

Good Grief, Goober!

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: "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." First of all the amendment was written a few years ago and obviously their idea of arms was a nice knife, axe, pitchfork or a single-shot musket, with which an expert could pull off three to four shots in a minute - and maybe even hit something once in a while. In 2013, NRA president David Keene told an interviewer, “This nation was founded as a result of the fact, people, citizens who had a musket above their fireplace grabbed the gun when an emergency confronted them. For four million Americans, the AR-15 is the musket of today.” The slight difference is that the musket of today can fire off 700 rounds in a minute. The downside being the need to slap on a new hundred-round clip after twelve seconds or so. The good news is you probably don’t have to aim all that much, just wave it around and keep that finger on the trigger.  As you can see, they’re almost identical.

The amazing Key & Peele

Gun zealots blissfully ignore the first phrase of this amendment - the well regulated Militia bit. Personally, my focus always landed on the necessity of having a Militia. I admit that until just now I myself have all but ignored the qualifier of said militia. All of a sudden my focus was drawn to the words well regulated. I know most of the self-proclaimed patriots - relentless defenders of the Second Amendment to the exclusion of just about everything else in the known universe - detest being regulated in any way. However, since it’s right there in the Constitution they love to claim they love, as one of the first words to the very Amendment they cling to like the few parts of the Bible they choose to follow verbatim, shouldn’t they at least pretend to be conflicted? At the time we needed a militia to protect us from the King of England (and huge corporations like the East India Company) and that militia was apparently to be well regulated. It’s there in writing…on real hemp parchment, written by the original American patriots. Today’s patriots don’t even make a show of trying to explain it away. They simply pretend it’s not there. Or maybe they never actually read it. How many of these trigger-happy arms bearers are well regulated? And by whom? Every day another of them let’s a child shoot, and often kill someone with their safely stored guns. Do these people even really know what a “free state” is? Most of them are clearly off their meds.

Our founders were not demanding freedom to have unfettered access to guns. They were
interested in freedom for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You may notice that the first of these freedoms is inversely related to the unfettered - dare I say unregulated - access to guns as it turns out.

I. Mangrey reporting. Bang!