The Second Amendment As It Is Written

On January 3, 2013, I wrote and published a post entitled One Appalachian Man's Opinion Of Gun Control which since that time has consistently been one of my most read and most commented upon posts on this blog.  Naturally, there have only been two opinions expressed about that blog post, either I am a genius or I am an idiot who wants to forever damage the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution and have the government take away every gun everybody in America owns.  Since that post was written, the four worst mass shootings in American history have taken place.  The post was actually written in response to the Newtown School Shooting on December 14, 2012, which killed 28 people if we include the shooter and his mother. It is only natural to include all the dead after a mass shooting.  But we still do not  have a consistently used and solidly defined understanding of what constitutes a mass shooting.  The verbiage varies from at least three victims shot but not necessarily killed to three or four dead shooting victims.  Since many murder suicides involve spouses or life partners and are generally limited to two dead, most murder suicides do not fall into anyone's commonly used definition of a mass shooting unless they involve several other victims besides the shooter such as children or other relatives.  Another truly bizarre quirk in our examinations of mass shootings and other forms of mass murder such as bombings, arson, and vehicular homicide is that the media and police almost never use the words "terror", "terrorism", or "act of terror" unless the event is perpetrated by a non-white, non-citizen, non-Christian who has expressed some belief in some form of government or religion which is not prevalent in American society.  It is my considered professional opinion, both as a writer and a retired mental health professional, that all mass murders are acts of terror.  No one with good sense would ever approach a survivor of such an act or a relative of one of the victims and argue the point that an event which killed four or more victims was not an act of terror.  All murders, all attacks of any form which kill or seriously injure multiple victims are terrorizing to the victims, witnesses, other intended victims, survivors, first responders, and family members of those murdered or injured.  As a society we need to broaden our definitions of terrorism and acts of terror.  If Porky Pig became enraged due to rabies or having eaten poisonous food and marched into his local mall and killed, maimed, or otherwise injured a dozen people we should and probably would call it an act of terror because Porky Pig is not like the rest of us or his human victims.  But if a Right Wing Religious lunatic who is Caucasian, a self professed "Christian", and an auxiliary deputy  in his local sheriff's department lost his mind and shot and murdered his wife and three children, it is highly unlikely that any form or media or any police spokesperson would call that an act of terror. That is a serious flaw in our reporting, policing, and analytical perspectives.  We must recognize that terror and terrorism do not need to be committed by a Muslim, an African American, an immigrant, or a Rastafarian in order to be terrorism.  Any murder, whether by gunfire, bombing, automobile, stabbing, or poisoning terrorizes both the victim and her family and friends as well as any witnesses to the act.  

I regularly refer to the website Gun Violence Archive when I am seeking information about gun violence, mass murder, or murder statistics in America.  They are the best, most impartial, and most accurate website in the nation in the field of gun violence statistics.  As I am writing this blog post on January 2, 2018, there have already been 138 gun violence incidents with 50 deaths and 83 injuries in less than two days in America.  If you do not believe or understand it, that is far too many incidents, deaths and injuries in what is supposed to be the most civilized country in the world.  In Australia, the country most people commonly think of as being a great deal like America, there have been no mass shootings since a wide ranging change in their laws following the worst mass shooting in the country in 1996 which killed 35 people and wounded 23 more.  Strong gun laws worked in Australia.  They will work in the United States and the 2nd Amendment gives the judicial and legislative branches of government full power to regulate guns and their ownership and usage in America.  

There is something deeply flawed morally, ethically, legally, and religiously in any country which will not take appropriate actions to prevent the murder of 15,000 people and the unnecessary maiming of 30,000 others a year.  The language of the 2nd Amendment is this:
"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."

The National Rifle Association has managed, by spending hundreds of millions of advertising dollars and buying the support of thousands of elected officials, to perpetrate the mistaken belief that the government does not have the right to regulate gun  ownership.  The US Constitution is a living document and the US Supreme Court has the right to interpret that document to fit the needs of a changing world.  The phrase "well regulated militia" gives the courts and legislatures full rights to regulate all guns, gun ownership and use, and all auxiliary paraphernalia related to their use.  Both guns and automobiles can be and are used to commit murder, mayhem, and mass injuries and death all across America.  We regulate automobiles and their use from sea to shining sea and we regularly change the laws to meet the needs of the country as is taking place at this time in response to self-driving automobiles. Every state in the union requires registration, insurance, and a drivers license to own and operate a motor vehicle.  But anytime any courageous legislator or judge steps to the plate and makes an honest attempt to regulate guns a public outcry occurs and the National Rifle Association and its well trained members scream, yell, lobby, and threaten to riot in order to prevent life saving progress.  As a nation, we need to re-educate our populace and our legislators to the need for comprehensive federal gun control legislation.  We need to replace any elected official who will not support that effort.  We need to fund organizations which are fighting to improve gun control legislation and we need to lobby both individually and collectively until that legislation is enacted.  

I propose the following changes to US gun control laws and I propose that they be enacted immediately.  However, I am not naive enough to believe this can happen today, tomorrow, or even this year.  But it must happen step by step. 

1. All guns must be required to be registered.
2. All transfers in gun ownership must require a background check conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and that should include transfers of ownership within families in cases of estate management and gifting.  
3. Those background checks must include all sales at gun shows.  The gun show loophole must be eliminated.
4. All gun ownership should require the owner to complete and pass a basic gun safety course with testing as a requirement to pass the course. 
5. Gun ownership by convicted felons, the mentally ill, and those convicted of any crime of violence should be illegal.
6. All fully automatic guns should be illegal in the country except for use and ownership by legally constituted police agencies functioning as an arm of a federal, state, city, or county government.   
7. All appurtenances such as bump stocks and modified firing mechanisms which can be used to make a gun fully automatic should be illegal. 
8. All parts required to compose a working gun capable of firing, sometimes known as ghost guns, should be illegal for sale unless they carry a registered serial number and require the same permits, clearances and record keeping as complete guns.   
9. The creation of all firearms or any other mechanism capable of firing a bullet or missile of any kind via the use of printers should be illegal with a minimum prison sentence upon conviction.
10. No magazines holding more than five rounds should be legal.  
11. Armor piercing or "cop killer" ammunition must be illegal. 
12. Ownership of all forms of military weapons such as grenade launchers, flame throwers, and rocket launchers should be illegal.
13. All guns seized in the commission of a crime should be impounded by the police and courts and held until the complete legal process in the case has been completed up to and including the expiration of appeals timelines.  Upon conviction and expiration of the appeals process, all weapons used in the commission of a crime should be required to be destroyed the state police in the state in question. 

     I realize most of the ideas expressed in this essay are not going to be well received by supporters of unrestricted gun ownership.  That is fine with me.  We, as a nation, must become willing to listen to the uproar until such time as education and legislation have eliminated the need for these actions.  

Watching "Loving" On Valentines Day

Richard and Mildred Loving Photo by Find A Grave

On Valentines Day 2017, my wife Candice and I watched the movie "Loving" in a theater.  This movie has had one nomination for Ruth Negga for the Oscar for Best Actress In A Leading Role which was the only Oscar nomination for the movie.  The film has been quietly and persistently well reviewed and has been moderately successful in the theaters.  But it ranks barely in the top 75 money grossing movies of the year at this point and is likely to fall lower as the year goes on and more mass market money machines hit the big screen.  But earnings or Oscar nominations were not the motivation for our attendance.  The story the movie tells is why we went and why every Appalachian and American movie buff ought to see this movie. You should also see this movie even if you hate movies but care about human rights. "Loving" tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia, who married in 1958 in violation of the miscegenation law in Virginia at that time.  They actually had to travel to Washington, DC, in order to get the ceremony performed.  Shortly after their marriage, they were arrested in Caroline County Virginia and eventually took a plea agreement by which they were sentenced to one year each in prison which was suspended and they had to agree to leave the state of Virginia and not to return together for  twenty-five years.  In compliance with the sentencing agreement, they left Virginia and moved to Washington, DC, for several years.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Loving couple eventually appealed the conviction in 1967 to the Supreme Court of Virginia and ultimately to the United States Supreme Court where their appeal was upheld and the miscegenation laws of at least seventeen states were overturned.  It was one of the most historic decisions delivered by one of the most active and productive incarnations of the court. At that time, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, Byron White, and Potter Stewart were all members of the court and, during their tenure together, became one of the most effective liberal voting blocks in the history of the court. The Loving decision made interracial marriage legal in the entire United States.  The Loving Decision will always be one of the most important decisions in the history of the court and the United States.  I was sixteen years old at the time and a senior in high school but I do not actively remember it.  I was raised, as I have mentioned many times on this blog, in an area of Knott County Kentucky which was totally white.  I did not attend school with an African American until I began Upward Bound the summer after my sophomore year in high school which was 1966.  But I had heard often in my childhood of one church in the Indian Bottom Association Of Old Regular Baptists which was integrated long before I was born.  That church was the Little Home Church which had been founded by African American members of the Old Regular Baptists and had always been integrated.  It was located on the opposite side of the county and my family never attended there.  That part of the county was the home of nearly every African American in the county at that time.  Residents of the two sides of the county rarely mixed unless work required it. 

Later, as an adult in about 1973, I was taken by Don West to a church in Matoaka, WV, which had been integrated for many years and had two ministers, one black and one white. About that same time, I also made a trip to Washington, DC, with West Virginia poet and professor Robert F. "Bob" Snyder where we stayed in the home of an interracial couple who had married and lived in the District of Columbia at about the same time the Loving couple lived there. From March 1989 to July 1992, I worked for a company which had a very high percentage of interracial marriages among the employees and came to know a fairly large number of such couples who had all individually and collectively faced the kinds of prejudice which the Loving couple faced in Virginia.  Unless you have lived in such a marriage, you cannot know what kinds of pressures, prejudices, and discrimination these people faced.  I do not pretend to know even though I probably have more experience in this area than most average Appalachian Caucasian males in my age range. It is also impossible for anyone who was not present in the extended families of Richard and Mildred Loving to have any idea of the courage required for them to appeal their case to the US Supreme Court and face the publicity, both positive and prejudicial, which they received as a result.

The movie is presented as much as a love story as it is as a historical or political story. The acting and the cinematography are both deliberately low key and the acting is both powerful and understated. The tensions of the time are seen in the faces and body language of the actors more so than in voice volume, timbre, or inflection.  It is a beautiful powerful piece of work on the part of everyone involved.  It is well worth seeing and I recommend it highly. I also would like to remind my readers of just how many earth shattering legal cases the ACLU has been involved in since their creation in 1920.  This organization is the most important guardian of civil and human rights in America.  At this time, they are under attack from the radical right and need your help morally, socially, and financially more than at any time in their history with the one possible exception being during the McCarthy Communist Witch Hunt during the 1950's.  Join the ACLU, make a donation, support them publicly and privately.  They have been protecting you since before you were born.  In today's political environment, you, your family, your ethnicity, your social group could become the next victim of a Right Wing Radical attack.