I haven’t done one of these in a while. The idea is, throw out nine comments on a topic without defending any of them, hoping to provoke discussion. (The number nine came from my first attempt: it might have been John Lennon’s birthday, and the number 9 popped up.)
I’ve seen evidence that it is difficult to stay friendly with this topic, but we’re a friendly group.
Fools walk in…
- I’ve got hobbies: woodworking, cooking, a little gardening. I don’t mind some inconvenience in pursuing my hobbies if it somehow serves the public good. I avoid rainforest lumber, for example, even though it can produce beautiful work. It’s disconcerting that so many gun hobbyists view their own preferred hobby as inviolate.
- But, there IS a Second Amendment. The Founders did not see my frying pan or saw or spade as likely to be threatened. They did see a danger in the federal government controlling gun ownership.
- The Second Amendment is fuzzier than many other Amendments in the Bill of Rights, though. The First Amendment does not begin: “A well-regulated Church and Press being necessary to a free state”. The Supreme Court has given federal, state, and local governments broad latitude to regulate guns.
- We’ve had several gun murders and suicides in the state recently. Most of them would not have occurred or succeeded if the killer had been using a knife or blunt instrument. The mix of guns, liquor and/or drugs, and adolescence is particularly volatile.
- The talk of “America’s gun culture” is too facile. Which is the cause, which the effect? Is America more violent than other countries (I believe it is, but I won’t check out the stats here) because we have more guns – or have we armed ourselves more heavily because we are more violent? Perhaps violence is less common in very homogeneous cultures; perhaps the great strength of America has a dark side.
- Is the role of guns changing in New Hampshire and in America? Fish & Game is running out of money because fishing and hunting licenses are declining. Wal-Mart is dropping guns from some of its local stores.
- The claim of gun rights proponents that their weapons Guard Our Liberty is just plain preposterous, IMHO. There is simply no believable scenario where that happens. (And by the way, where were our Sentinels of Liberty when habeas corpus was killed?)
- Would gun registration create a national database that would be used to confiscate weapons from owners? I really don’t see how that is supposed to play out – especially if we are relying on our armed brethren to protect us. If gun owners don’t revolt then, when would they? But, national databases on personal information are troublesome in general. There are all sorts of privacy issues today, from misuse of Social Security numbers to REAL ID. Those of us somewhere in the middle on gun rights are probably more sympathetic to privacy frames than to the dubious specter of confiscation.
- Gun rights seems to be an asymmetrical issue. The people who favor more regulation are less active, less single-issue, than those who oppose them. I don’t know whether that is good or bad – but I know that it favors the gun rights activists.