David A. Schwinghammer, click here
to update your web pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
What Would Thomas Jefferson Say? 4/6/2013 9:20:53 AM
It looks like the Senate might be too timid to pass a general background check prior to gun purchases. What would our founders say?
Just read a letter to the editor defending Adam Lanza’s mother as just as much a victim as the 20 six and seven year olds and the six teachers and administrators who died at Newtown, Connecticut. Well, I guess you can expect this sort of attitude from somebody who claims there aren’t enough bullets and guns left on the shelves since the massacre.
It’s time for these people to grow the (expletive deleted) up. The NRA’s immediate response was kind of fuzzy, like they might actually agree to a general background check, but LaPierre’s membership must have given him too much blowback because his next utterance was the ridiculous idea that uniformed cops should be stationed in all the schools across the country. Oh, yeah, he also wanted to arm the teachers. Duh. How much would that cost? Isn’t it just a bit hypocritical for a member of the austerity brigade to suggest something like that?
LaPierre and others who treat dangerous weapons like toys are hoping this will all go away (until the next time). The wimpy senatorial reaction to background checks seems to imply that the NRA is once again winning. We can’t let them get away with this. Kudos go out to Connecticut, Colorado, and New York, the only states, so far, to pass some very tough restrictions. Libertarians and others haven’t seemed to notice the up tick in attacks on prosecutors and police. White supremacists seem to be getting the blame, but I’d put a load on those knuckleheads who ran out and bought guns and ammo right after Obama’s election and again after Newtown. How paranoid are you people anyway? You have a better chance of winning the lottery than being attacked in your home in the first place, unless you live near a high crime, overpopulated, area. I’d probably buy a gun then, too.
As far as defending yourself, your assailant has got the drop on you. Even if you’re sitting on your recliner with your Glock next to you, he/she will probably beat you to the draw . . . and kill you because you had the gun in the first place. I get a kick out of these conservative articles citing a grandmother who defends herself against an intruder. First off, it probably took them six months to find somebody like her. Secondly, she had to be sitting there looking out the window spying on her neighbors, or she wouldn’t have seen him coming. A more likely scenario is that a member of your family will suffer because you were careless with your weapon. Don’t believe me?
I’m not sure where this happened, but three separate individuals accidentally shot themselves at a gun show during the same time span. Of course, one guy said he didn’t know the gun was loaded. 35% of Americans own guns and there are approximately 300 million guns in circulation. So a lot of these people must own more than one. What’s the fascination? A grandfather in Jonesboro, Arkansas, had one of those gun collections. It was protected by an innocuous padlock that his grandson easily cut through. He and his friend then took the weapons to their middle school and mowed down their classmates and some of the teachers. The grandfather never did any time as far as I know, but I know I would have sued him for every dime and piece of property he had if one of those kids had been mine. Instead, at least one of the parents, not affected by the shootings in Newtown, sued the school district. Somebody needs to step up and go after the right scofflaws, like Wayne LaPierre, Winchester, Remington, and NRA lobbyists.
Conservatives like to use Thomas Jefferson as their mentor in respect to just about everything in the Constitution, including the second amendment. Well, here’s a quote from the new biography that gun lovers should think long and hard about. T. J. said this after he’d served two terms as president, long after he’d pontificated about states rights, an agrarian utopia, and small government as a young man. "Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," he wrote in 1816. "They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions . . . But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
So then, what might Thomas Jefferson say about our present state of affairs and the Republican party’s insistence on Second Amendment rights? Would it be fair to say that he might want it amended?
