But they are coming for your vaginas
Unlike the right of women to make their own reproductive choices, the right to bear arms faces no serious challenge in the United States of America.
This is a comparison that unsettles me, of course. Anti-abortion rights folks grant personhood to any meeting of a sperm and the egg, but no one doubts that the lives threatened by guns actually began at birth. However, looking at how the left and the right approach what they perceive as encroachments on “freedom” is useful right now.
When gun owners see outrage at the random execution of 20 first and second grade students and immediately begin imagining jackbooted thugs coming for their guns, it betrays a kind of paranoia that makes the affection for firearms seem like a fetish or a compensation for other deficiencies. Freud would certainly have something to say about it.
Frankly, it’s scary and dangerous that some gun owners imagine their arsenal as their last defense against the government or some end times scenario. But that’s their right—and unless we amend the Constitution, it’s never going away.
Even if we banned all weapons, gun violence in this nation probably wouldn’t disappear. Britain and Australia both made huge changes in gun laws after school shootings that have prevented any more massacres on campuses. But they weren’t facing the NRA or starting from a sprawling gun culture that has as many weapons as people.
However, as President Obama said, “No single law or set of laws can eliminate evil from the world but that can’t be an excuse for inaction.”
The Brady Campaign—founded by former White House Press Secretary Jim Brady and his wife Sarah after Jim was shot and paralyzed during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981—believes in separating gun owners from the source of most of the nation’s gun paranoia, the NRA.
The left often refers to the NRA with pejoratives that remind me of how the right describes organizations that enable choice like Planned Parenthood including “blood-soaked.” But the NRA’s agenda is so obvious. They seek to sell guns and they sell more guns by creating the perception guns will some day be taken away. That’s why, through organizations like ALEC, they seek increasingly crazy gun laws for the left to oppose.
The NRA has to invent opposition because they’ve won the debate.
The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee says he won’t even consider any new gun safety legislation. President Obama only expanded gun rights and the NRA waged all out war to defeat him, despite calling them their best salesman ever.
The NRA has made it so that even discussing this issue is challenged. Speak about guns and confuse an AF with an AK and you’re ridiculed and mocked. You have to have hollow-point bullets to hunt BY LAW in some states.
You need a Masters in firearms to discuss gun legislation. Yet anyone with a flag pin is an expert on a uterus.
If only guns were as well regulated in this country as vaginas are.
We’re constantly talking about the last abortion clinic closing in Mississippi. In every state that isn’t bright blue, legislation is being constantly proffered to make it harder and more onerous to make your own reproductive decisions.
For the right to firearms to ever to ever be seriously abridged, you’d need 2/3 of Congress and the states. However, we’re one vote on the Supreme Court from overturning Roe v. Wade. If that happened, within weeks, the right to end a first trimester pregnancy that was the result of incest or rape would be gone in at least a dozen states.
The right likes to point out that you have a better chance of being hit by lightning than dying in a mass shooting—an argument that meant nothing to them when used by the left to argue against ridiculous voter ID laws.
We do need to be honest and point out that gun violence on a whole is way too common—yet it is down from all time highs. As are school shootings.
That should gird us against a solution that’s worse than the problem. Except is that really possible when Republicans are simply pledging to do nothing?
In the massacres at Newtown, Aurora, Tucson and Virginia Tech, the killer all used the same gun, a gun that’s covered under the Assault Weapons Ban that President Reagan endorsed and Republicans let lapse.
THE SAME GUN. AND IT’S LEGAL.
(BTW: Under the proposed ban to be introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Safe Seat), existing guns would be grandfathered in because this is America. No one is ever coming for your guns.)
The burden is now on us pro-lifers from the left to act to make sure real steps are made to prevent massacres that offend the human spirit so heinously that doing nothing is an evil in itself.
But the burden is also now on gun owners.
Prove to us that owning this type of gun with this type of multi-multi-round clip—only designed to kill multiple humans—is necessary when there is even a chance that it can be used to execute 20 children in minutes.
Is that a right even worth having?
[Photo by Anne Savage]
