After the massacre

An opinion writer in The Washington Post asks us in effect 'How often must this happen?' That's an excellent question, and overdue. 

I'm not living in America myself - I'm 35 or 40 miles north of your border in Canada, but let's face it, America - you've got the world's number one military with more firepower than anybody. Here's the website that says so. So today's Question Everything has got to be: "Why do you need gun laws that allow any mentally challenged or disturbed individual easy access to automatic weapons that most of the rest of the civilized world considers restricted weapons the access to which is limited to trained and authorized personnel for specific purposes?"

Who is running America these days - the government or the goddamned NRA? Some of us bystanders in the cheap seats here would really like to know. Does the NRA support the survivors of these massacres, comfort the loved ones, and replace lost incomes, or even apologize for its own stupidity? Of course not! So why are you letting them go on misinterpreting your Constitution's section about the right to bear arms? Remember the context in which that Constitution was written. It was a long time ago, and prior to that, the original colonies were under British jurisdiction and they made the laws, some of which regulated who could run around loose with guns. There were definite restrictions because those Brits were shipping their convicts to your colonies, and they feared an uprising, and justifiably so.

Your Constitution's part about the right to bear arms in its original context was intended to allow ordinary citizens to bear arms for their own defense against a possible attack from outside their own colonies - to repel an invasion in other words, and prevent the British or anyone else from imposing their will on the American people against the wishes of the citizenry. It wasn't meant to allow just any trigger-happy nitwit the right to carry all the weapons he could lift, and blast away at anything that seemed like a likely target. The nation's founders weren't idiots, and neither should you be, no matter what you hear from the NRA or its lobbyists and special interest groups.