The Second Amendment Must Go

We didn’t turn on the TV to watch the coverage of the latest school shooting because we already know everything we need to know about why this happened. It happened because it could. Because it happens every day in this broken country. This one hit a little harder, though, because it happened close to home.

My mother-in-law attended school through eighth grade at that school. My wife and her two siblings were baptized at the church. But this isn’t the first time I’ve felt a personal connection to a school shooting. The first was the Sandy Hook shooting, which happened about ten miles from where my own two kids were attending elementary school at the time. That was the day I became radicalized on the issue of gun violence.

This is what a bullet does.

I’m not interested in the politicians’ responses because both parties have proven themselves feckless on this issue. There have been some exceptions, notably the Connecticut congressional delegation, many of whom were in office when Sandy Hook happened and who have been unwavering since in their efforts to combat gun violence.

The only thing I’m interested in hearing now from politicians is a proposal to repeal and replace the Second Amendment. That poorly-worded amendment has been the bane of American existence for at least the last forty years, and especially since the disastrous 2008 Heller ruling, which secured the right of individuals to own firearms without respect to being a part of a “militia,” as specified in the Second Amendment.

If you think it was always thus, it was not. In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment only protects weapons that have a “reasonable relationship to the effectiveness of a well-regulated militia.” Sawed-off shotguns, for example, do not fit that description. Heller effectively threw out such controls. And here we are, hundreds of thousands of lives later.

Yes, hundreds of thousands. On average, gun violence kills upwards of 40,000 Americans per year. That number includes suicides. Simple math tells us that, since Heller, around 750,000 Americans have lost their lives to guns. More than died in the Civil War. Far more than died in WW2. Where is the monument on the National Mall to honor the sacrifice those Americans made so that neckbeards can have personal armories?

We have turned our country into an abattoir. Every single day in these united states, we know that people will be shot to death in their homes, on the streets, in restaurants and movie theaters and churches. Every single day, Americans will glance around the shopping mall and idly wonder where they will hide if a shooter opens fire. Every single day, we bury a child or two or three. We bury a domestic violence victim, shot to death by her partner. We bury a veteran who took his own life. We bury cops and firefighters shot at when called to duty. We bury so many people we don’t think twice about it. The price we pay for freedom.

Whose freedom, though? Not mine. Not my family’s. Guns make us far less free, not more. How free are any people when a knock on the wrong door could – and does - lead to homicide? How free are we when we know each time we walk out the door we might lose our lives to a stray bullet? A road rage incident? A mental health crisis? An armed society, despite the bumper sticker, is not a polite society. We’re armed to the teeth – how polite are we?

If the Supreme Court has affirmed that the Second Amendment guarantees the rights of individuals to murder each other at will then the Second Amendment has to go. Should individuals be allowed to own firearms? Sure, but it should function much more like a privilege than a right.

We regulate tools all the time; we regulate the hell out of cars, for example. Who can drive them, at what age, what qualifications you need, the insurance you have to have, and, importantly, the ways in which that privilege can be revoked. All of it is tightly regulated, and such regulations enjoy widespread support among the populace because everybody understands that automobiles, in the wrong hands, are incredibly dangerous. Even in the right hands they’re incredibly dangerous. So we pass law after law to ensure that they’re as safe as can be.

We mandate seatbelts, air bags, we impose speed limits, conduct Breathalyzers. The result: automobile fatalities have fallen year after year. Between 1975 and 2023, automobile fatalities fell by 62% per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Meanwhile, the rate of gun deaths continues to climb despite the fact that, on a day-to-day basis, guns have far less utility than automobiles. In other words, we use them a lot less but they cause a lot more death and destruction.

Those numbers don’t take into account the secondary effects of gun violence. The injuries and associated medical costs. The shattered lives of those left behind. When a bullet ends a life, it also upends the lives of so many others. Families, friends, neighbors, co-workers. I saw it firsthand after Sandy Hook. One bullet can do generations of damage.

And we don’t care. Which is why I didn’t watch the news today and I won’t be watching any coverage of the shooting. And it’s also why I know these words will fall on deaf ears, just as they have every single time I’ve written them for the last 13 years. We’ll do nothing to stop the carnage this time because we’ve done nothing every other time. Well-meaning people will make well-meaning noises. No action will be taken. Because America has decided its ok to sacrifice her children for the gun lobby. Because America is broken.