Are the Second Amendment's piles of corpses — the necessary price of Liberty?

© 2017 Peter Free

 

04 October 2017

 

 

A graceless nation?

 

By now, it should be clear that American culture thinks that our "right" to bear firearms is worth the mountains of dead folk that our idiotically interpreted Second Amendment reaps on a daily basis.

 

 

Does this body count make "protection of Liberty" sense?

 

Maybe not.

 

One of the arguments supporting the Supreme Court's legally obtuse reading of the Second Amendment is the one that posits that citizen-owned weaponry is a bastion against Government's potential tyranny.

 

Such a reading envisions millions of stalwart individuals toting their firearms to somehow offset the might of an American military run amuck.

 

Obviously, this interpretation is unrealistic.

 

Short chains of supply, interior military lines — (meaning those exercised in a geographically closed domestic setting like ours) — and overwhelming air power mean that:

 

 

Ain't no group of rifle-toting civilian yutzes gonna win or survive such a fight.

 

 

The 'barrier to tyranny argument' also fails — when assessed historically

 

Did you see hordes of Second Amendmenters out protesting the Patriot Act's disembowelment of traditional American freedoms?

 

Any pushback from them against the NSA's wolfish ravaging of the Fourth Amendment?

 

Any marching against America's increasingly embodied police state?

 

Any peeps in favor of Liberty (writ large) at all?

 

Uh uh.

 

 

The moral? — Ain't no deep thinkers here

 

The Gun Lobby is happy:

 

 

making money hand over fist

 

shooting and plinking

 

metaphorically slurping beer

 

while —

 

(arguably meat-headedly) watching bodies pile up.

 

 

Preferably with a NASCAR race in the background to emphasize our "semen-all" Americanness.

 

Exercising freedom against Government tyranny has nothing at all to do with these definitively "us" (a pun) pleasures. And everything to do with anti-social idiocies taken to extremes. Witness, for example, the bump stocks that the Vegas shooter reportedly used to (pretty much) fully automaticize his weapons. Full auto is supposedly illegal in the United States, yet we're wink-and-smile silly enough to legalize gizmos that achieve its equivalent.

 

That's the American gun lobby for you. Nothing is ever too far in Murderous Dangerousness' direction.

 

In fairness — and in the Gun Lobby's favor — American foreign policy is based on exactly the same justifications. We are, as a national entity, consistent in exercising rapacious destruction in all realms.

 

Maybe we should be proud. If we cannot be "exceptionally" smart, moral and competent — at least we can be "exceptionally" violent, greedy and anti-socially stupid.

 

There is always a silver lining.