First thought: the argument over guns has become so fraught and emotional that it has moved entirely out of the realm of rational argument for many people. Alex Jones's infamous tirade on Piers Morgan's program is just one example. As I watched it, a thought occurred: guns, for this man and many of his like-minded followers, have become a fetish, in most if not all of the categories listed by Merriam-Webster in its definition:
1.a : an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverenceb : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion...c : an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression2: a rite or cult of fetish worshipers
(Including c, above, may be the biggest stretch, but somehow I don't think so.)
And the problem with the fetishization of guns, the so-called gun culture, is that it pushes people into modes of thinking that are of the "from my cold dead hands!" sort. The successful Australian gun-control effort strongly suggests that a similar effort here could save a lot of lives (a lot of lives). But given that the rhetoric of the gun culture sounds frighteningly similar to what was heard from slave owners in the run-up to the Civil War (guns, like slaves, being abstracted into a "defense of lifestyle" mindset), I'm afraid that any attempt to repeat the Australian experiment here would end up with massive casualties.
Second thought: a huge part of the argument over the Second Amendment, whether people realize it or not, has to do with commas, and where they are placed. This New York Times article from 2007 sums it up nicely. In short, it is this: the version of the Bill of Rights in the National Archives reads as follows, with three commas:
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.
But the one in the Library of Congress, which was supposedly directly supervised and approved by Thomas Jefferson, has only one comma (and fewer capitalized letters):
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 fun part is that the states ratified different versions, with greater or fewer commas; and if comma placement affects meaning, does that indicate that the states never actually ratified the same amendment? If that were ever determined to be true, the entire amendment would be null and void.
To everyone's great relief I will avoid a close dissection of the grammatical implications of differing comma placements. Suffice it to say--from where I stand, yeah, actually, the extra commas do make a substantial difference.
(Wait, can't help myself! The short version: the phrase "the right of the people to bear arms," when set off by the extra commas, becomes a subordinate clause to the phrase "being necessary to the security of a free State," thus aligning the rights of the people with the notion of a free state; without the extra commas, it is merely an extension of "A well regulated militia...")
Third thought: what about those three words, "well regulated militia"? At first glance, it would seem to upend the gun-control argument altogether. The screamers--the people shrieking about any limitation on the Second Amendment being an unconstitutional infringement of their liberty--would seem to be ignoring the fact that the notion of regulation is right there in the language of the amendment. That was certainly my first reaction when I looked at it. But there is a somewhat archaic definition of "regulated" that seems to have been what the framers intended, namely that a well-regulated militia was one that was well-trained and highly-skilled. (There's a nice summary here.) What we think of as regulation now, like environmental or financial regulations, is not what was intended then.
Damn!
But that brings us back to the whole argument over how we interpret militias. If the framers intended militias to mean military or paramilitary operations that are well-trained and highly-skilled (the National Guard, basically), doesn't that argue against the idea of something like the Minutemen, ad hoc citizens' brigades defending their homes on an impromptu basis against--almost certainly--exactly the sort of professional, government-sponsored militia that is contemplated by the amendment?
Thoughtful responses are welcomed. Shouting will be vigorously ignored.
