Sherry the reasons aren’t valid now and they surely weren’t valid then either.
The insensible stances that appear indelible in the irrational minds and cold hearts of gun advocates because of some amendment to the constitution which has been exploited as such under false pretenses of fear and loathing has slippery slope implications in the indiscriminate maiming and killing of innocent children.
Gun control was originally meant to be discriminate though.
The thing is, gun violence has become almost commonplace, desensitizing us to the point where we’re no longer surprised. The response is the same each time, too: Politicians urge for more gun restrictions or attribute it to extremism, the masses collect on social media to voice their opinions and nothing ever gets done. Mass shootings occur once more. The cycle repeats. (Medina, M., October 2017, The Diamondback, Univ of Maryland Newspaper)
Because of the outsized proliferation of guns today, stricter gun control will present a slippery slope unless those gun controls laws are comprehensive and carry maximum penalty. That requires proposing amendments to the Constitution. And if we were able to magically reach that consensus you will literally have to pry it from their cold dead hands!
Proposing changes to the amendments to the Constitution was made virtually impossible by the founding fathers whom are still considered to this day as absurdly infallible. They presented a quandary of their own making, back then and now, to our own demise, especially those who have become victims of the sentimentality of the 2nd amendment. They did this haphazardly through majoritarian procedures written into Article 5 of the Constitution.
The problem starts with Article 5 of the Constitution. It provides that an amendment can be proposed either by a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate or by a convention, called into being by Congress, after a request from two-thirds of the states. That’s version A and version B of step one. If an amendment makes it through either one, then comes step two: ratification by three-quarters of the states. In other words, an amendment requires a supermajority twice — the pig must pass through two pythons. By contrast, ordinary legislation requires the approval of a simple majority in each house.
The founders made the amendment process difficult because they wanted to lock in the political deals that made ratification of the Constitution possible. Moreover, they recognized that, for a government to function well, the ground rules should be stable. But they also understood that the people will need to change those ground rules as new challenges and problems surface with the passage of time. They didn’t mean for the dead hand of the past to block necessary progress. — (Posner, E., 2014, Slate)
In some instances they probably did mean to make those idealizations permanent based on the sentimentality of the times prior to the 2nd Amendment. That sentimentality arguably stands by the notion that the right to bear arms is in self-defense of not the standing army (federal) and not by a state’s regulated militia (police and national guard) because that would be stupid and you will die, but because it was legal to form a militia out of some perceived threat which has historical racial undertones. However, the Civil War, and civil rights bills subsequently has curbed that since then.
At the time of the Constitution’s adoption every state had a compulsory militia for most able-bodied males, The militia’s performed critical military and police functions in both the North and the South, where they were militias were often called “Slave Patrols.” The voluntarization of the militia did not occur in the northern states until the Jacksonian era, with Delaware, actually a slave state, being the first in 1831. Thus, there was an expectation that gun owners were as trained and well-regulated as they might be when preparing to enter the National Guard.[13]
There is a difference between a band of armed rebels and a well-regulated militia. Militias are like police or the National Guard, and can be called upon by the State or even Federal Government to put down insurrections and uprisings. Historical uprisings include the Whiskey Rebellion, Shay’s Rebellion, and Slave Rebellions. A fringe U.S. group that currently calls themselves a militia is not the same as the militias of early America in that it operates without legal sanction.
If you feel threatened by your government on the state or federal level then there is a democratic process already in place for that. The individual right to bear arms in self-defense is to assist and ensure that it remains a free state from an organized militia, whether via foreign or by domestic insurrection, when called upon.
To obfuscate matters further, guns have garnered recreational value outside of hunting animal stock for sustenance(unnecessary)/sport(local and state approval necessary) or from being preyed upon by animals or when animals attack (shouldn’t be much of an issue or concern in general settings). Recreational use is confined to controlled environments so that they do not infringe on the rights and safety of others.
Rationally and agreeably we are not seeing appropriate control measures in the much vaster realm of civic society with the ongoing spates of gun violence — mass shootings and socioeconomic criminality — resulting in the loss of innocent life or incivility. What we are seeing is a rash of gun violence for perceived grievances causally, and we immediately presume them (as a false justification in most instances) attributable to mental illness. Is there any reason to believe that the widespread availability and unrestricted accessibility encourages malevolence without necessarily the prerequisite of mental instability or cognitive impairment? Now we do have certain laws in place to prevent gun control from being discriminately applied under suspect classifications unjustly for instance…
One example of the increasing fear of armed blacks is the 1834 change to the Tennessee Constitution, where Article XI, 26 of the 1796 Tennessee Constitution was revised from: “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence,”[9] to: “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”[10] [emphasis added] It is not clear what motivated this change, other than Turner’s bloody insurrection. The year before, the Tennessee Supreme Court had recognized the right to bear arms as an individual guarantee, but there is nothing in that decision that touches on the subject of race.[11]
As messy as this issue is, many years have past and we have yet to properly clean this up constitutionally because of the perverse sentimentality that surrounds this issue.
