A Killing Country

Amendment II. 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. 

 It is on the basis of this amendment that gun advocates maintain the right to have personal weaponry in their possession, with no limits or regulations.  I cannot see how the National Rifle Association (NRA) or other gun-toting entities conclude that this Amendment gives citizens carte blanche to own and use their firearms indiscriminately.

First of all, each state already has a “well regulated Militia” called the National Guard, which in my mind eliminates the need for individuals to “keep and bear Arms,” since that is precisely the National Guard’s role.  Not only does each state have its own National Guard, but the country as a whole also has a well-regulated Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and now a Space Force, which would seem to be enough fire power to maintain the security of not only the “Free State,” the U.S,  but also to serve as a force to maintain security throughout the world (as the U.S. has mostly done since after World War II). 

I have heard people argue that what the Second Amendment really means is that people may have to rise against the Armed Forces if the latter decide to subjugate the citizenry.  In the past several months, President Trump has, in fact, used the armed forces to subjugate Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Portland (Oregon), Memphis and Chicago, using the National Guard, and has threatened to expand that use of force to other cities like San Francisco.  In Minneapolis, Minnesota, another armed entity, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has killed a mother who was peacefully protesting their presence and an ICU nurse shielding a woman from their attack.  I have not heard the NRA or any other gun-toting group suggest that their members should rise up and defend ordinary Americans against this “Militia”.  I am thankful that they haven’t, but it also belies the argument that we are bearing arms in case our military turns on us.  So, what exactly is the point of all these weapons in the hands of citizens? All we have achieved is to have the highest murder rate in the free world (and most countries that are not considered to be “free”).

Warren Burger, the Supreme Court Chief Justice in a 1992 interview, called the Second Amendment “the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by a special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”  Burger was appointed by Richard Nixon, a Republican, so he was not a “bleeding-heart liberal” or a “left-winger.”  In that same interview, he stated that if he were to make any change to the Constitution, he would eliminate the Second Amendment. 

In 2008, Antonin Scalia, another conservative Supreme Court Justice, wrote an opinion that the Constitution conferred a right to own a gun for self-defense at home, a departure from previous interpretations of the Second Amendment, which put hardly any restrictions on gun ownership.  Even Scalia, however, felt that the Amendment did not give “a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”  

We have gone well beyond self-defense at home to indiscriminate murder.  In a September 2024 report, Johns Hopkins University reported that:

 “For [the] third straight year, firearms killed more children and teens, ages 1 to 17, than any other cause including car crashes and cancer.”

On September 10, 2025 I was at a matinee showing of a play called Assassins about assassinations of and assassination attempts on U.S. presidents.  When I left the theater in mid-afternoon, I saw a text from my daughter-in-law to all the grandparents that we may have heard about the shooting at Evergreen High School.  (My granddaughters’ elementary school is just a few hundred yards from this high school.)  She wanted to assure us that she had rushed to the school to pick up the girls, along with some neighbor children, and that everyone at the elementary school was safe.  The school was in lockdown and police had arrived to ensure their safety.  As I was driving home, my son from Salt Lake City called to check on the girls, and mentioned a shooting in Orem, Utah.  I had no idea what he was talking about, and the news on the car radio was focused on Evergreen, not Utah.   Once I got home, I turned on all media to figure out what was going on and to check in with my daughter-in-law and my other son who was at a conference in Chicago and was rushing home to be with his family.  It was all chaotic. 

We have become inured to news of shootings in the United States.  Charlie Kirk’s murder in Orem, Utah got a lot of publicity, but the Evergreen High School shooting was hardly mentioned.  Just another school, another shooting. Shooter dead, another two students maimed.

When my sons were in kindergarten in Colorado in 1993, their school conducted a tornado drill which required the students to squat in a windowless hallway for a brief time.  One of my boys was terrified by the exercise, not quite understanding that it was merely a drill.  Now all students, including kindergartners, have shooter drills.  We may be raising generations of children who will suffer from post-traumatic stress, all so politicians can preserve a mindless and misinterpreted law and get their kickbacks from the NRA.  Is the life of a child so cheap in America?

There have been countless attempts to rein in gun ownership in the U.S., and they have all failed.  Anyone can buy a gun at a gun show without having to prove competency or sanity.  Buying a gun at a gun store is more difficult, but most who apply get their guns.  Any time there is an attempt to tighten licensing or determining the mental state of gun buyers, the NRA and its supporters stymie the effort.  Hairdressers and tattoo artists are regulated more strictly than gun owners.  It is time to pass regulations limiting gun ownership.  There are already more fire arms in private hands in the U.S. than in the military.

I read a quote from Kirk saying “I think it’s worth to have a cost of [sic], unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given rights.”  That is staggering on more than one level--that toting guns is a “God-given” right and that “some” deaths each year are worth it so some crazed or disgruntled individuals can have their “God-given” right to murder.  I was hoping that since a conservative had been shot, one of their own that they regarded as a hero, that the gun lobby would reconsider their position on gun ownership, but in the flurry of news that has followed, Kirk and Evergreen High School have been forgotten. According to Brady United (named after James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, shot at the same time as the attempt on the president) an average of 327 people are shot in the U.S. every day, with an average of 117 dying.  All so we can have the “God-given” right to own guns.  I wonder what God thinks of this.