Second Amendment Rights (and Wrongs)

 “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.” This is the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger on the Second Amendment: "The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word fraud—on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

How many times have you heard someone say, “They’re coming for our guns?”

How many times has that happened?

Zero times. That is how many times the government has “come for our guns.”

That is the fraud to which Justice Burger was referring. The fraud persists.

People are forever yelping about the threat to their Second Amendment rights. My totally subjective take: I am so fed up with the fear-hate-mentally unbalanced mindset of the poor deluded gun lovers who have been sucked in by this fraud, this lie, among other lies that are frolicking across the American landscape.

I have no patience for the people and conditions that sell the lies to create that mindset. I am appalled that so many people in this country feed on delusions like, “they’re coming for our guns.”

No, they are not coming for your guns. That is a lie which you have swallowed whole, and it is making all of us sick.

Now that the restrictions of the pandemic are beginning to loosen, mass shootings have returned. I have not missed those shootings, and I am certain that there has been gun violence in America right along throughout our Plague Year, but it did not get the publicity because, you know, pandemic.

In the type of mass shooting to which I refer and which occurs in the United States, the shooter is almost always an angry young white male, and the victims are innocent people who were minding their own business up until all hell broke loose.

The weapon of choice is the AR-15 automatic rifle, which, when it hits people, turns them to mush, which is exactly what it was designed and built to do.

Some people have formed private, unregulated militias to protect their Second Amendment rights, as they see them. A lot of those militiamen showed up at the Capitol on January 6, and at some state capitols, including ours, all duded up in their pseudo-military uniforms, flak jackets and bulletproof vests. They came not to secure our free state, but to overthrow it.

They call themselves patriots, which they are not, and say they love their country, which they do not. They love the fear and rage they have about what the country should be and is not in their opinion, and what it used to be, which it never was.

These patriots do not realize that what they are voting for and literally shooting for is the enriching of the already rich and the impoverishment of themselves. They consistently vote against their own best interests to elect people who do not give a rat’s patootie about them.

That is what this old lady thinks, anyway.

I personally do not have any guns, for two reasons. First, I am gun-ignorant, and have heard that having a gun “for protection” but not knowing how to handle a gun can lead to your being shot by your gun.

Second, when my kids and my grandson were little, I did not want to have any tragic accidents.

My dad had two rifles and a shotgun that lived in a gun safe in the hallway. He had cause to use them sometimes around the ranch.

My late husband, Rick, had two guns, a .22 rifle and a black powder pistol. He had to make the lead balls for the pistol himself by melting lead and pouring it into a mold. A few months before he died, he gave both guns to an old friend of his. When I asked why he gave them away, he said, “Because I know you hate guns.”

He wanted them to go to a good home. He knew he was dying, and he was probably afraid I would toss them. He spared me having to decide what to do with them, which was kind.

All of us have lived with guns and mostly guns are used for hunting, target practice, or maybe knocking off predators.

My dad took my brother and me out target shooting one day when I was quite young, and it was great fun and it turned out I was good at it. Once my mother got wind of it, though, my shooting days were over. It wasn’t easy being a girl in the fifties.