Firearm worship official religion
Maintaining a firearm in one’s own home seems assured under the latest Supreme Court ruling. But there may be some difficulty in using that rifle or handgun to threaten a recalcitrant neighbor who has refused to keep his crab grass from encroaching on your manicured lawn. Following the court’s completely expected ruling extending the Second Amendment protections to state and local gun owners, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley fired back. He pushed a law through the Chicago City Council that would prohibit gun shops in the city and confine guns to inside one’s house. Even the front porch would be off limits. Naturally, a lawsuit to block it already has been filed.
The court’s decision was inevitable following the earlier ruling that the Constitutional right to bear arms was being thwarted by strict gun control laws in the District of Columbia.
The decision, however, was sufficiently vague as to give some limited hope to opponents of unfettered firearms access. Daley immediately saw an opportunity to delineate plans for the most restrictive law in the nation. Other efforts in major cities to adopt ordinances that designate what guns can be carried where and by whom and under what circumstances can be expected. All will be challenged by the National Rifle Association and its followers who disdain any effort to bring sanity into the gun debate.
But the court has shown twice now that sanity is not its concern when it comes to this issue. It seemed to ignore the fact that 258 school children were wounded by guns in Chicago, 32 of them fatally, in a short period.
Interestingly, the NRA got off cheaply here, not having to use its bankroll to buy off the Congress as has been its usual pattern. The Supreme Court’s decision, not including the lawyer fees of the Chicago man who argued that the restrictive laws under question were a threat to his well being, was free.
In the meantime, worshiping firearms has been designated as an official religion. By one vote the court decided the founding fathers were preserving an individual right when in the 18th century they adopted the Second Amendment. The court has seen clearly that the prescient men who drafted the Constitution understood with extraordinary vision the needs of the 21st century.
Implicit is the understanding that despite a largely rural society at the time, our founders envisioned a great urban sprawl where only those who owned weapons with the capacity for mass destruction would be assured of survival. Future Americans it seems would need unlimited firepower both to protect themselves from the denizens of concrete canyons and to supply the nation’s military minutemen for defense.
Also, how would these citizens put meat on the table without an Uzi well oiled and ready for the day’s hunting? You don’t think George Washington was that much a visionary? It really doesn’t make much difference whether he was or not. The court majority clearly thinks he and his colleagues were. despite a couple of hundred years of prior justices who weren’t quite sure. They preferred not to tackle the issue head on, indicating in ancillary decisions that they thought the Second pretty much was meant to fulfill the military needs of a nation without a major standing army. After all “on to Bunker Hill” was still ringing in the ears of the framers. But none of this is relevant now. The five justices who carried the day have made that a fact over the objections of police at all levels, mayors of cities besieged by gunfire and countless deaths, and governors who worry that their state universities might be subjected to the kind of tragedy that befell Virginia Tech. The court, showing at least some wisdom, left the question open about state and local laws that attempt to safeguard us from gun possession of certified crazies and felons. Whatever occurs in the blizzard of lawsuits expected to be filed in the wake of this decision, it is certain that changing the outcome as long as the current court is with us is pretty much out of the question. So sleep easy, but try to engage the safety before putting the pistol under the pillow.
E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan@aol.com.