COUNTERPOINT: People in hell just donned sweaters

by: Blue Girl

Fri May 07, 2010 at 16:30:00 PM CDT

Denying firearms purchases to people on the no-fly list is a terrible idea, because two wrongs do not make a right, and the "No Fly" list is, to my lights, an offesnsive and unconstitutional apostasy.

I am more than the resident gun nut around here, which is defined as a person who owns way more guns than they need, but not nearly as many as they want. I was also one of the civil libertarians yelling the loudest whe the "No Fly" list was rolled out, and I have not budged off that position.

It is, by most estimates, over a million names long, and there is no way in hell that there are that many terrorists in the entire freakin' world. I would doubt that there are even a tenth that many real terrorists in the entire world, if you added up all the nutcases from every fundamentalist freakshow on the planet, who are willing to die and kill innocents for an ideology.

Not only that, once your name is on their unconsgtitutional enemies list, there is no getting off of it. Remember all the trouble Senator Kennedy used to have at the airport after we trashed our first amendment right to freely associate? Or how about eight-year-old Mikey Hicks? He is no-fly listed, can't get off of it and isn't even old enough to exercise his Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm. Maybe he will never want one, but maybe he will. Adopting Lautenberg's ridiculous rule now would deny him his right to own a firearm for hunting,  forevermore.

When they start picking away at the amendments that comprise our Bill of Rights, I get my hackles up right quick and get real fucking protective - mama bear protective - of that Second one.

An abrogation of the Constitution is still an abrogation of the Constitution, even when it achieves an end that one finds desireable; 'tis a fair-weather civil libertarian indeed who will take such an offense in stride just because they don't like the thing the abrogation is aimed at.  

Instead of trashing the Constitution twice, hows about we do some common sense things that will actually make us safer, instead of more posturing and hyperbole that does nothing to make us safer, but merely sounds good in theory.

Instead of sound-bite posturing, how about some of our elected officials start showing some political courage by taking on the NRA and proposing some common-sense gun laws?

Yes, you read that right. I am an admitted firearms fanatic and I am also in favor of regulating guns.

I don't want everyone who wants a firearm to be able to satisfy that desire. John Hinkley, Mark David Chapman and Seung-Hui Cho come immediately to mind as examples of people who should never have been allowed to purchase a gun.

I would love to see a standard framework brought into compliance across all fifty states so gun-running would at least be a challenging profession.

I would like to see straw-purchases cracked down on and I would like to see every firearms transaction registered, even if it is between family members. If I sell my cousin that deer rifle that has been passed around the family since the sixties, it should be handled and recorded at the county sheriffs office. This would not be an infringement on my personal liberty. I am still free to sell my cousin, or anyone else, a deadly weapon - so long as the buyer can pass the background check, and it ought to include mental health events.

But before that background check can bar a purchase, the person being denied their rights needs to have been afforded due process before those rights can be stripped away.

The firearm libertines need to do a gutcheck. A mail-order deer rifle snuffed out the life of a president and a handgun sparked off World War I.

Any person who does not realize that guns changed everything, that guns made the prince as vulnerable as the pauper, that they hold in their hands the power to change the bend of the arc of history every time they pick up a firearm...they should never pick up a firearm.

We live in a somewhat free country, and the fact that ordinary citizens have the right to wield that sort of power, each of us undividually, enshrined in the Constitution, ostensibly as a pillar of our freedom - but most of the folks packin' today I quite frankly can't imagine as patriots and freedom fighters, so can we take the tri-corn hat off the second amendment, please?

It isn't just the gun nuts who give us all a bad name in need of a gutcheck, though.

We all need one.

We could do a lot to curb gun violence and keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and terrorists alike if we would just start fully enforcing the laws on the books, but we also need to bring a basic framework of laws into standard compliance across all 50 states, as I alluded to earlier. States need to share information. Thorough background checks for all firearms purchases should be mandatory, including psychiatric/psychological occurrences. I would go so far as to mandate that private sales, those currently unregulated, would have to take place through the county sheriffs office; and any unregistered sale proven in a court of law would carry a stiff penalty, with mandatory prison time.

We can't make guns go away. And I don't want them to. But we can make new ones harder to get and we can control the ones that are out there by actually enforcing the laws that are on the books right now and getting serious about bringing the ones that are out there currently untraceable into the system one-by-one. (It ain't ideal, but it's a start - until smarter people than me can get serious about this. Which will require standing up to the NRA.)

Let me finish with a bit of unvarnished truth...every god damned one of us who has the proper reverence and respect and can be trusted with the kind of power that a firearm represents - every one of us who really deserves to own a god damned gun - knows some fucking body we (at least secretly) wish would give all their guns away and become vegans because one trip outdoors with them scared the living shit out of us.