Lunatic Gun Dealer Defenders

Gun Dealer Defenders and Other Members of the Lunatic Fringe
by Richard Aberdeen

Today, two days after the horrific loss of 33 American lives at Virginia Tech University, CNN.com reported that over 300 people were maimed and murdered in Iraq, most of them in the main central marketplace of Baghdad that Senator John McCain claims is so much safer since the "surge". The death count was at least 171 and rising as of this morning.


Some folks might call it "insensitive" to compare these two examples of modern-day carnage within the same immediate context. I beg to differ, as rather, it remains highly "insensitive" that an American media continues to downplay and "backburner" the much worse ongoing carnage that Karl Rove and Company are directly responsible for in the Middle East, while our highly "insensitive" general population goes right on purchasing SUV's and shopping at the mall, as if the loss of teachers, friends, husbands, wives, students and children don't mean anything at all, unless they happen to be our own.

And meanwhile, the Lunatic Fringe have crawled out in full force from under their slimy NRAolithic rocks, to encourage the ongoing insanity of unbridled ownership of firearms in our homeland of the not-so-free and overwhelmingly naive to continue, while our "passionate conservative" president neatly sidesteps the issue. The word "gun" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, which was purposely very carefully worded by those who drafted it, in particular, the first ten amendments.

The 2nd Amendment does not mention either "guns" or "firearms". The Constitutional framers chose to use the much broader term "arms", which did not mean the same thing as "firearms" to the framers of the Constitution, any more than it means the same thing today. Thomas Jefferson owned his own private cannon, the largest military weapon available at the time. The term "arms" at the drafting of the 2nd Amendment, included anything used in warfare, for hunting, for personal defense and/or, for personal attack.
Today, that would include nuclear and conventional bombs, all manner of chemical and biological weaponry and soon to be included, space-ray weapons. Either the NRA and the rest of the Lunatic Fringe are going to push to allow private companies with satellites to possess their own private space-ray weapons, owners of private jets to mount their own private nuclear arsenal and allow their own next door neighbors to manufacture Anthrax whenever they wish, or they are going to restrict the 2nd Amendment.

There is no middle ground. Using the 2nd Amendment as a shield to allow unregulated ownership of modern firearms is without rational foundation and displays no more Constitutional logic than allowing individual Americans to personally own and possess unlimited nuclear and biological weaponry. I have long wondered what Charlton Heston would do if Michael Moore decided to mount a nuclear bomb on a Hummer and parade around Beverly Hills with a peace sign attached over a loudspeaker blaring, "long live the 2nd Amendment."

Sounds like a great Lethal Weapon script to me. Mel Gibson could play the racist bigot chauffer and Danny Glover could play the naked descendant of a slave, target of a racist bigot, running for dear life up ahead, shouting "the sky really is falling this time". Meanwhile, the hole in the sky and in our American soul keeps on growing, the planet keeps on getting warmer and the great river of Babylon tears keeps on flowing.


Richard Aberdeen
richard@freedomtracks.com
www.FreedomTracks.com