The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution can be repealed, just like any other.
I would utterly oppose repealing any part of the Bill of Rights. I mention the possibility only because I want to avoid it.
But people won't allow massacres like the latest one in Orlando, Fla., to keep happening forever. Gay nightclubs, schools, churches, college campuses, movie theaters. workplaces -- all sorts of places have been hit. The "good guy with a gun" strategy misses much more than it hits. Advocating that approach sounds ludicrous when it's applied after-the-fact to a crowded nightclub serving alcohol.
The 1996 ban on funding research on gun deaths was a severe mistake. I wrote that in October, after the slaughter at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. Nothing's changed since -- except the frustration level of people who were already fed up with these killings.
Without research -- even bad research that can be rebutted -- a debate on guns becomes purely emotional. One side will ultimately lose an emotional argument when the other side can point to dead bodies.
A rational debate on a serious problem cannot take place in a condition of deliberate ignorance. Look at the "assault weapon" ban passed by Congress in 1994 that expired in 2004. Gun control advocates now want the ban renewed. The law's authors and its supporters clearly didn't like military-looking weapons, so they banned rifles with pistol grips, flash suppressors and collapsible stocks, for instance. Not a one of those kind of features makes a gun more lethal.
What makes one semi-automatic gun deadlier than another in a mass shooting is the speed and ease of reloading it -- feeding it ammunition. Guns don't kill people. Bullets do. Not even high-capacity magazines matter as much as the ability to quick-change from an empty box or drum to a full one of any size.
Does looking like a military weapon make "assault weapons" a favorite for nuts? Is that what appeals to them? Quite possibly; I'd like to know. One reason I don't is because Congress yanked money from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because the CDC was researching firearm deaths. No one has taken up the slack since.
One pro-gun control article from New York this week had the author describe firing a 5.56mm-caliber semi-automatic "assault weapon" at a gun range. He was "traumatized" by how loud and "explosive" each shot was, he wrote. His shoulder was "bruised." I kid you not. In describing his experience, he used the term "PTSD."
Wow. Firing a .30-06 might have put this guy in the hospital. But after my eyes stopped rolling, I realized something. We now live in a era when people write -- and read -- horror stories about ammunition that's no more powerful than the .30-30 cartridges many of us old Southern guys fired when we were kids.
Unfamiliarity with guns grows worse each year. People who know about guns don't do enough to correct this because they don't want any part of passing any restrictions. So if guns are outlawed, only the uninformed will write those laws. Gun advocates need to either help write some common sense law or the clueless will do it.
Repeal of the Second Amendment might not come in my lifetime -- or it may. Few thought in 2003, for instance, that legalization of gay marriage was just 10 years away.
Forget about the next presidential election. Forget about appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Someday a solid, insistent majority will say "Enough." We can argue all day long that Norway, for instance, had some of the toughest gun control laws in the world and that didn't stop a mass shooting there. It won't help. Norway hasn't had one since. Neither has Australia, which passed tough gun laws in 1996 and hasn't had a mass shooting since. Something less drastic might have worked. We'll never know.
When people are frustrated and can't do something effective, they do something else. This is especially the case when they are forbidden from learning what some effective alternative might be.
Liberty isn't defended by guns sitting in gun safes and owned by people with their fingers in their ears. Liberty's only defense is courage, using whatever weapons are at hand -- including facts. Courage of gun-owners' convictions isn't evident when they won't even allow people even ask, "How did this happen? What can be done to stop it?"
Do something or watch it done. Those are the options.
Commentary on 06/18/2016