Twenty-Seven Dead at Elementary School -- It's Time to Repeal 2nd Amendment
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I don't want to appear hasty. But my son goes to an elementary school, not unlike the one in Connecticut, where a mass shooting has just taken place, and multiple deaths are now being reported.
I do not pay taxes to live in a bunker or like the war-weary inhabitants of Sarajevo or Rwanda. This latest shooting has just tipped the scale for me. We all know there is no possible way to stop mentally unstable people from being well, unstable. How do flimsy laws calling for background checks, protect us citizens, when more often than not, mass murder will be the only crime the gun purchaser has committed. Criminologists, psychologists, so-called psychics are unable to identify who in the general populace will snap at any given moment in time. Apparently, not even the shooters' roommates are able to tell when the person they've been living with for months is taking out the trash without being prodded, or hiding an AR assault rifle in the plastic garbage bag, intent on mass murder.
I say, forget trying to convince the National Rifle Association (NRA). Enough is enough. If you too realize that there is no way to protect innocent people from random gun violence, please take a moment to sign this anti-Second amendment petition or become involved in one of the anti-second amendment organizations listed in a Google search. It won't happen over night. But sooner or later sanity will reign. I hope we don't have to wait until staunch NRA members begin losing their own children in mass shootings at the local elementary school. An insightful 2007 article at Salon.com posited:
At the moment, of course, repealing the Second Amendment seems as politically plausible as welcoming Iraq as the 51st state. But think of how many other causes have gone from the radical to the routine in a single generation. Not even a decade ago, civil unions for gay couples seemed laughably utopian. Now it is the bipartisan middle-ground position in both parties (insert second Cheney reference). When the conservative Federalist Society was founded in 1982 with the goal of combating the liberal tilt to the federal judiciary, not even its founders could have imagined how successful they would be a quarter-century later.
Times change, generations pass and attitudes evolve. As fears of crime recede in many places, nervous homeowners may no longer be obsessed with having a .45 by the bedside to blow away phantom intruders. There is also an implicit racial component here with the bygone Archie Bunker generation having a specific image of exactly whom they feared climbing in a window at night. Even the fearsome NRA may well sharply decline as a political force, much as once-fierce-jawed interest groups like the American Legion and the labor movement have grown increasingly toothless over the past quarter-century.
RELATED POST: Let the Gangsters Have the Guns
I don't want to appear hasty. But my son goes to an elementary school, not unlike the one in Connecticut, where a mass shooting has just taken place, and multiple deaths are now being reported.
I do not pay taxes to live in a bunker or like the war-weary inhabitants of Sarajevo or Rwanda. This latest shooting has just tipped the scale for me. We all know there is no possible way to stop mentally unstable people from being well, unstable. How do flimsy laws calling for background checks, protect us citizens, when more often than not, mass murder will be the only crime the gun purchaser has committed. Criminologists, psychologists, so-called psychics are unable to identify who in the general populace will snap at any given moment in time. Apparently, not even the shooters' roommates are able to tell when the person they've been living with for months is taking out the trash without being prodded, or hiding an AR assault rifle in the plastic garbage bag, intent on mass murder.
I say, forget trying to convince the National Rifle Association (NRA). Enough is enough. If you too realize that there is no way to protect innocent people from random gun violence, please take a moment to sign this anti-Second amendment petition or become involved in one of the anti-second amendment organizations listed in a Google search. It won't happen over night. But sooner or later sanity will reign. I hope we don't have to wait until staunch NRA members begin losing their own children in mass shootings at the local elementary school. An insightful 2007 article at Salon.com posited:
At the moment, of course, repealing the Second Amendment seems as politically plausible as welcoming Iraq as the 51st state. But think of how many other causes have gone from the radical to the routine in a single generation. Not even a decade ago, civil unions for gay couples seemed laughably utopian. Now it is the bipartisan middle-ground position in both parties (insert second Cheney reference). When the conservative Federalist Society was founded in 1982 with the goal of combating the liberal tilt to the federal judiciary, not even its founders could have imagined how successful they would be a quarter-century later.
Times change, generations pass and attitudes evolve. As fears of crime recede in many places, nervous homeowners may no longer be obsessed with having a .45 by the bedside to blow away phantom intruders. There is also an implicit racial component here with the bygone Archie Bunker generation having a specific image of exactly whom they feared climbing in a window at night. Even the fearsome NRA may well sharply decline as a political force, much as once-fierce-jawed interest groups like the American Legion and the labor movement have grown increasingly toothless over the past quarter-century.
RELATED POST: Let the Gangsters Have the Guns
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