In the advent of too many school massacres to now count, including the recent mass shooting at Virginia Tech, we should at least be questioning our gun laws. Annually, more than 4,000 shoes from the feet of children killed by violence are delivered to the White House steps. Courts deliberate whether or not to charge child killers as adults. Now, more than ever, we should be compelled as a society to conquer our dinosaurs. Why would we contemplate life sentences and death penalties for children, but not gun control? We are mired in past ways that no longer coincide with our modern times. If we don’t confront the dinosaurs still roaming our lands, the laws of our land, we will deliver extinction to ourselves.
Let’s look at the Bill of Rights in the context of the time in which it was written, and then, let’s examine it in the context of our present times. Let’s compare the weapons used then to the weapons used now. Let’s explain weapon access now, and weapon access then. Let’s examine whether a Bill of Rights written and established in the late 1700s is still pertinent to these modern times, more than 200 years later. The first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, which is what we refer to as the Bill of Rights, were ratified on December 15, 1791. Amendment II covers the right to bear arms:
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.
We must first acknowledge the first phrase, which refers to Militia. Again, I ask you to contemplate the time during which this was written – a time not long after the American Revolutionary War. This was a time when men donned wigs, banyans, and cravats, while women wore petticoats and cloaks. Education was minimal and primarily took place at home or in one- or two-room schoolhouses, with studies focused on Latin, math, and a few other core subjects. Many children also began to learn their father’s trade when they reached school age. People lived primarily in farming and fishing communities and the main crops included tobacco, corn, wheat, rice, barley, oats, as well as apples from orchards. Many of the men also hunted for deer, rabbits, and turkeys. The primary occupations of the time included trades such as apothecary, blacksmith, brick maker, wheelright, wigmaker, harness maker, silversmith, founder, milliner, and shoemaker. Obviously, those were very different times from these times, and I’m sure that, in light of the recent fight for freedom, arms were thought of by the majority only in regards to protecting the country and hunting for food.
Needless to say, the weapons of those times compare in no way to those of our present times. Today we hear about ouzis, AK-47s, TEC-9s, and Lorcin .25s – all weapons that can kill large numbers of people in simple seconds, with one swift sweep of the arm. During the time at which the right to bear arms was established, the weapon of use was a musket. Muskets were very slow to load, highly inaccurate, and frequently unreliable. A well-trained soldier could prime, load, and fire a musket three times in one minute, and the process of firing just one shot was a 12-step one. Muskets did not fire bullets; they fired round lead balls, some of which were the size of a quarter. At short ranges these lead balls could inflict horrible damage on soldiers, as they smashed against a person’s body; however, one could not hit a target more than 50 meters away, directly in front. During the time when a musket was a soldier’s only weapon, he did not aim his weapon, but instead pointed it in a general direction and hoped for the best.
We know without a doubt that the weapons available to the common street person today make the muskets of that time look like the pea shooters that they were. We must also keep in mind that it was for those very pea shooters for which the Right to Bear Arms was established. Today we have too many arms in too many hands, we live in the country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, and we have an NRA that constantly preaches that gun ownership somehow creates security. In a country that has almost a pop culture of violence and crime, perhaps we should begin to question the laws that enable the general public to be as well armed as our police and military forces. If we revisit these antiquated laws, maybe we can create new laws, laws that address new times, and laws that can assist this country in beginning the progression towards becoming less volatile and violent.
